Nikhil Sobanbabu

I'm a Masters Student in Electrical and Computer Engineering Student at Carnegie Mellon University. I work with Prof. Guanya Shi at the LeCAR Lab on Learning and Control of legged robots. My current work is on reducing the Sim2Real gap of legged robots using Real2Sim techniques and providing Online-Adaptation during deployment. Additionally, I also collaborate with Search-Based Planning Lab on Multi-Agent Quadrupeds

I received my Bachelors in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras during which I interned as a Robotics Intern at DiFACTO Robotics and Automation focusing on navigation and recovery of in house AMR. I also worked as a Research Intern at Dynamic Robotics and Control Laboratory under the guidance of Prof. Quan Nguyen on Model-based priors guided Reinforcement Learning for Agile Legged Robot Control. Apart from this I was part of Team Anveshak, a student run Mars Rover Team of IIT Madras which participates in University Rover Challenge at Mars Research Desert Station,Utah and worked as an Embedded Systems and Control Engineer, later getting promoted as Team lead for the period 2022-2023.

Email  /  Resume  /  Linkedin  /  Github

Research Interests

I am interested in developing algorithms that integrate learning and model-based control to enable robots to be agile and adaptive to model inaccuracies and environmental uncertainities.

[Webpage|Arxiv|Code]

[Website|Arxiv|Video|Code]

[Extended Abstract|Video]

[Webpage|Arxiv|Video|Code]

[Webpage|Arxiv|Video|Code]

[Webpage|Arxiv|Video|Code]

Improving Payload Adaptability of CaJun controller by Augmenting it with ℒ₁ Adaptive Control.

[Report|Poster |Code]

Investigation of different image dehazing techniques to improve terrain traversability analysis for Autonomous vehicles.

[Report |Video]

Optimal Strategies found for a 1vn game by solving the HJI-PDE equation for a 1vn game with a reach-avoid objective.

[Thesis Report]

Coordinated autonomous control of multi-agent quadrotors in a regular polygon formation with varied orientations using the in-built mellinger controller.

[Report] | [Poster]

Autonomous control of Manipulator using inverse kinematics and ROS moveit.

Autonomous navigation of an Agricultural robot to identify and pick and place bellpepers inside a greenhouse.

[Video] | [Github]

Planner chooser behaviours encoded as latent modes using monte-carlo roll outs to be robust against perturbations generating emergent transitions between modes/behaviors.

[Results Video]

Simulation environment for the single attacker, singe target, multiple defender pursuit evation differntial game.

Swing-up is done using a control from an energy based Lyapunov function. After a reaching an appropriate angle, pole-placement based stabilisation kicks in.

[Report] | [Presentation video] | [Github]

Problem Statement: Optimal pick and place of multiple objects to a given destination with payload constraints for the mobile manipulator.
Solution: Dijkstra+Modified TSP for navigation. RRT* for manipulation.

[Report] | [Github]

Fun Mini-Project

Why WASD when you can play minecraft with ESP32

Miscellaneous

Flagship event of Shaastra, IITM's Technical festival for the year 2022. Participants convert a prototype to a minimum viable product.

[Link]

• Reviewer for IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025
• Reviewer for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL) 2025
• Reviewer for Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2025
• Reviewer for IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2025

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