Akshay Hinduja

PhD student, Carnegie Mellon University

About me

Hi! I am Akshay Hinduja, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Prof. Michael Kaess at the Robot Perception Lab. I also obtained my Master’s from CMU, advised by Prof. Kenji Shimada.

I work on perception and SLAM, mainly for underwater robots. My interests lie in the development of field robots to achieve autonomy. My current focus is on making cheaper underwater robots perform as robustly as their far more expensive counterparts.

Apart from research, I enjoy spending time outdoors, be it on foot or my mountain bike! From time to time, I also enjoy painting, astrophotography and reading!

I am currently in the final year of my program and looking for opportunities starting in summer 2024!

sliceoflife

News

2024

  • Our paper, “SONIC: Sonar Image Correspondence using Pose Supervised Learning for Imaging Sonars”, has been accepted for ICRA 2024!.

  • Reviewing for IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2024

2023

  • Presenting a poster for our work “SONIC: Sonar Image Correspondence using Pose Supervised Learning for Imaging Sonars” at IROS 2023, Detroit. We are presenting at two workshops, 2nd Advanced Marine Robotics and Closing the Loop on Localization.

  • Reviewing for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO)

  • Reviewing for IEEE Journal of Ocean Engineering (JOE)

  • Presented my thesis proposal title “Underwater Localization and Mapping for Cost-Effective Robots”. Got a couple of exciting projects in line to improve feature-based SLAM using imaging sonars!

  • Reviewing for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).

  • Our paper, “Conditional GANs for Sonar Image Filtering with Applications to Underwater Occupancy Mapping”, has been accepted for ICRA 2023!.

  • Reviewing for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).

2022

  • Attending IROS 2022 in Kyoto, Japan!.

  • Our paper, “Acoustic Localization and Communication Using a MEMS Microphone for Low-cost and Low-power Bio-inspired Underwater Robots”, has been accepted for IROS 2022!.

  • Reviewing for IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO).

  • Reviewing for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters(RA-L).

  • Won the Milton Shaw Ph.D. research award from the department of Mechanical Engineering!

  • Head TA for 24-787 Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence for Engineers.

2020

2019

  • Attending IROS 2019 at Macao, China!.

  • Our paper, “Degeneracy-Aware Factors with Applications to Underwater SLAM”, has been accepted for IROS 2019!.

  • Our paper, “Designing a Mobility Solution for Fully Autonomous Welding of Double-Hull Blocks”, has been accepted by the ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics!.

2018

  • Started PhD program in the Mechanical Engineering department, advised by Prof. Michael Kaess at the Robotics Institute.

  • Our paper, “Feature-based SLAM for imaging sonar with under-constrained landmarks”, has been accepted for ICRA 2018!.

2017

  • Promoted to Systems Engineer at RPL.

  • Joined Robot Perception Lab(RPL), Robotics Institute as Extern.

  • Completed my Master’s in Mechanical Engineering, working on NDT based lidar odometry of a welding robot, advised by Prof. Kenji Shimada.