Side Quests & Theses

Projects, research internships and my two theses. Papers are on the publications page.

Simulated Franka Panda arm doing a combined pick and place task

I Never Showed It the Task

Phone clips of single skills teach a simulated Franka Panda combined tasks it never saw demonstrated.

Side project
Coupled finger joint positions on the real hand versus the ideal handoff

Tendon Slack & Actuator Nets

Finding tendon slack in the Shadow Hand Lite and trying three ways to learn it from hardware data.

MSc research
CAD render of a custom pick-up robot

Tabular RL on a Robot I Built

Ten Sutton & Barto algorithms on a custom robot in PyBullet.

Side project
The real Shadow Hand Lite rotating two Baoding balls

Manipulation in the Dark

MSc dissertation: blind sim-to-real transfer of a Baoding policy on the Shadow Hand Lite, with 55 rotations in a row on the real hand.

MSc · Edinburgh 2026Thesis
Illustration of cascaded attention heads classifying a skin lesion

Spot the Pox

A cascaded attention module for telling Mpox apart from look-alike rashes, built at IIT Roorkee and later extended solo into a GCPR paper.

Research internship · IIT Roorkee
Illustration of a game controller producing a sequence of recommended games

RL-Powered Generative Recommendations

B.Tech major project with Siddharth Kelkar: sequential game recommendation with PPO and discriminators. It became the COMSNETS paper.

B.Tech · NITK 2025Thesis
Illustration of a magnifying glass finding a tiny tumour in a scan

Finding the 0.01%

Tumour segmentation in PET/CT scans where under 0.01% of pixels are tumour, using a custom loss that took Dice from 0.41 to 0.656.

Research project · NITK