Career Story

I grew up in India and started working with robots long before I had good hardware to build them on. My first hands-on project was in 2014, working with the Aldebaran NAO robot at Institute Mihailo Pupin in Belgrade. That same year I joined the small team at Sirena Technologies in Bangalore building the first version of Nino, a 16-DOF humanoid. I designed the structural CAD model and wrote the ZMP-based walking controller for it. Nino is still around today, used in children’s education programs in schools across India.

In 2017 I was a finalist on the NASA Space Robotics Challenge team and got the chance to run the algorithms I’d written on NASA’s Valkyrie humanoid. I moved to the US that year to start my master’s in Robotics Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, and in 2018, while finishing my thesis on how toe joints affect legged locomotion, I got to test part of it on Boston Dynamics’ Atlas.

My career has been defined by pushing the boundaries of what legged robots can achieve. I joined Ghost Robotics in June 2018 as the first hire on the controls team, and I’ve been there since. I moved through Controls and Behavior Engineer, Senior Controls and Behavior Engineer, Lead of Controls Software, and now Head of Controls & Behaviors, where I set the multi-year technical roadmap across controls, state estimation, perception, and reinforcement-learning-augmented behaviors for the Vision series platform. The software my team and I have built ships on 1,000+ robots deployed to defense, disaster-response, and industrial customers in the US, UK, Australia, Singapore, and India.

Software Philosophy

On the software side, I value readability over cleverness. Simple code that the whole team can read and maintain beats a more “optimized” but opaque version of the same logic (a strong opinion of mine, though I know it’s a subjective one). I’ve led 15+ large-scale software deployments to real-world robots at Ghost Robotics, and one of the less recognized challenges of the job isn’t writing the software — it’s getting every layer of the stack, from motor controllers to autonomy to controls to the user interface, ready to ship at the same time across multiple teams tracking different responsibilities.

Outside Ghost Robotics

I try to stay involved in academic peer review. I was associate editor for ICRA 2026, and I continue reviewing for journals and conferences relevant to my research interests, including IEEE T-CST, RA-L, and IROS.

Personal Interests

Outside of robotics, I have cultivated a strong passion for food, health, and fitness.

  • Cooking: I enjoy preparing traditional Indian dishes and experimenting with ways to combine robotics with food preparation and automation.
  • Workouts: I competed in the Crossfit Open from 2022-2025 but have now transitioned to a more mild version of HIIT and yoga which suites my body better. Each spring, I challenge myself with a 10K run as a personal benchmark. In 2024, I also completed a half marathon though I quickly discovered that shorter distances are a better fit for me.
  • Health & Nutrition: I’ve explored holistic approaches to wellness, including two week long naturopathys programs in India and a 6-month nutrition course with a dietitian to deepen my understanding of natural health practices.

I believe the intersection of robotics and daily life activities like cooking and health can lead to meaningful improvements in how we live — it’s part of why I keep a recipe collection on this site alongside the robotics posts on my blog.

Why Legged Robotics

I believe robotics has the potential to solve real-world challenges by operating in the environments where humans live and work. My focus on legged robotics stems from the conviction that mobility and manipulation control is fundamental to useful robots as robots need to navigate stairs, uneven terrain, and complex environments just as we do. Through proprioceptive control and adaptive behaviors, we can create robots that are robust, reliable, and ready for deployment in the real world.