Introduction
“A senior undergraduate pursuing Electrical & Electronics Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati”
That introduction works well in a formal setting but more that misses the mark in capturing the essence of who I am. I am just an ordinary guy with an extraordinary amount of passion for intelligent machines. It amazes me that an assortment of inanimate stuff can be ingeniously put together to act, think and imitate life itself. My fascination with robots has become a part of my identity in my inner circles and has resulted in my aspirations to become a roboticist one day. It defines me better than the title above.
Why Robotics?
Early in my childhood, I developed such a crush on Science that I would gather newspaper clippings on the latest scientific news. Scientists and inventors had become a band of heroic explorers of the unknown and my attempt to join their ranks churned out designs of robot-run vertical farms and one-wheeled automobiles. It also earned me a reputation as “the one who wants to be a scientist” among my teachers, who …show more content…
Following an email conversation with Dr. Madhava Krishna (Head, Robotics Research Centre, IIIT-H), I spent ten weeks as an intern at the RRC, designing navigation architectures for an unconventional breed of robots that use FPGAs for brains. My second brush with research came in the form of HER2 Scoring Contest (University of Warwick, UK). After spending the summer automating an integral step in breast cancer diagnosis, my team and I went on to win that competition and (co-)author two journal papers, submitted to Cytometry Part A and IEEE Transactions on Medical Imaging. After an eventful summer, I opted for a thesis project in core robotics. With Dr. Guha and Dr. Krishnaswamy’s help, I am stretching my “research muscles” by attempting to train a hyper-redundant robot to navigate environments using reinforcement learning