Prasanna Sriganesh

Prasanna Sriganesh

Research Experience

Biorobotics Lab, Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh, PA, USA November 2021 - Present

I joined the Biorobotics lab as a Graduate Research Assistant and have been mainly working on two projects.

Multi-Modal Perception UnderGround (MMPUG)

  The goal of this project is to rapidly map, navigate, and search environments using a fleet of heterogenous robots. The fleet consists on fast moving RC cars and the Spot quadrupedal robot. My contributions to this project include,
  • Implementing a novel algorithm for detecting and estimating staircases using 3D point clouds (paper)
  • Developing a global planner for the fleet of heterogeneous robots to navigate robot to a target waypoint
  • Developing the sliding-mode autonomy stack for the Spot quadrupedal robot

Vertical Robot Transport (VeRT)

  This project aims to identify what technology gaps exist to carry heavy payloads upstairs in unstructured environments quickly. My contributions to this project include,
  • Evaluating different robot mechanisms to benchmark robot mobility on staircases and unstructured terrains
  • Designing controls for a planetary-gear wheeled robot that could carry 100lbs of weight upstairs

Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engineering, PES University

Bengaluru, India Aug 2018 - July 2019

During my final year of undergraduate study, I worked as an undergraduate researcher in the Dept. of Electronics and Communication Engineering under Prof. Rajasekar Mohan. I primarily worked on a humanoid robot and developed motion planning algorithms for the robot. Two papers were published based on the results of this work which primarily included,

TONY Humanoid Robot, 17 DOF small-sized humanoid platform for research

  • Computing a fast inverse kinematics solution based on geometric constraints for quasi-static balance (paper)
  • Implementing a turning mechanism using friction and slippage in the legs (paper)
  Additionally, I also worked on developing a low-cost ultrasonic sensor array that could be used a substitute for 2D Lidars for SLAM applications.

Microsoft Innovation Lab, PES University

Bengaluru, India May 2017 - July 2018

I joined the Microsoft Innovation Lab (now called the PES Innovation lab) as a research intern where I worked on the Explodroid project. My key contributions to the project were,

Explodroid - SLAM Robot

  • Designing the electronics circuitry and successfully implementing odometry using wheel-encoder and Kinect RGB-D camera
  • Successfully implement the ‘gmapping’ SLAM package to map an area
  • Autonomously navigate the robot to a target goal point in the constructed map
  After my internship, I continued working in the lab as a research-mentor. I mentored two teams working on robot manipulation and SLAM. My responsibilities as a mentor were to meet weekly and provide feedback on ideas. I helped one tema design a robot arm capable of catching projectiles. I also guided a team to expend a previous 2D SLAM approach to incorporate semantic information.