I am Atharva Ghotavadekar, an undergraduate student at BITS Pilani majoring in Electronics and Instrumentation Engineering. My research interests lie in the intersection of perception and control for mobile robots, including perception aware control. I find the application of learning based methods in real world robots a really exciting problem. The fact that we are getting closer to realizing human-like behaviour, and even better, on cyberphysical systems, is my primary motivation behind pursuing robotics.

I have a solid hold of programming in Python, C, C++ with OOP. Apart from programming, I have a good hold of simulation software and multiple frameworks for robotics such as ROS, Gazebo, Matlab, Simulink, etc. I also have a good amount of experience in hardware implementation, including Motion Capture Systems, multiple ground robots and quadrotors, UWB-based RTLS, etc. I have worked on research projects at Research Labs, Educational Institutions, Competetive Teams and Student run Groups. This has helped me to apply my knowledge in different scenarios and gain hands on experience in robotics.

I have worked at the Robotics Research Center at IIIT-Hyderabad on navigation of MAVs in GPS-denied constrained environments under the guidance of Dr. Harikumar Kandath. During my three-month stay, I also had fruitful interactions with multiple researchers, including professors, graduate and Ph.D. students. This enabled me to imagine better how the life of a researcher might be, and it deeply resonated with me. This experience heavily reinforced my inclination toward pursuing robotics research in the long term. I also worked in a shared space with a Ph.D. student working on a novel payload-agnostic UAV startup. Through our discussions, I gained valuable insights into the distinction between research and industrial product development and how the two are linked yet significantly different.

I am also the Chief Coordinator of the Electronics and Robotics Club of our campus. This role involves being the primary point of contact for interactions with professors, representatives from multiple industrial companies, and 200+ students at project displays.

I am an avid cricket and basketball enthusiast, and spend my free time in the evenings on the court. Apart from that, I am deeply interested in Indian as well as Western philosophy, so do reach out for a long discussion anytime :)

Feel free to check out my CV and drop me an e-mail if you want to chat with me!

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