Me

Hi there, and welcome to my personal website! My name’s Nishanth and I’m a researcher and engineer focused on AI and ML applied to robotics. I also moonlight as a writer.

Presently, I’m a Ph.D. student in the LIS Group within MIT CSAIL. I’m officially advised by Leslie Kaelbling and Tomás Lozano-Pérez. I also spend time at and collaborate with the Boston Dynamics AI Institute where I primarily work with Jennifer Barry. I’m extremely grateful for support from the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

In the recent past, I graduated from Brown University with honors in Computer Engineering. As an undergrad, I was fortunate to work on exciting AI + Robotics research under Brown’s BigAI initiative advised by Professors Stefanie Tellex, George Konidaris and Michael Littman. I spent time as a Research Intern at Uber ATG and Vicarious AI, and even had the opportunity to collaborate with researchers at MERL.

Outside of all this, I like to lift heavy things, read, play basketball, philosophize, cook, and sometimes make progress on various sci-fi novels/short-stories that I’ve been writing for longer than I care to admit.

If you’re interested in learning more about me or reading some of my writing, check out my resume, blog, fiction writing, or social links in the website footer. If you’d like to get in contact, check out this page here.

Recent News

  • New paper from my internship at the Boston Dynamics AI Institute is out! Check it out here.
  • Released a new blog post on the lab website that provides an intro to bilevel planning; check it out here!
  • Our work on learning efficient operators for TAMP has been accepted at CoRL 2023! Come check out the poster and chat with me if you’ll be attending!
  • Our work on learning efficient operators for TAMP is a spotlight talk at the RSS Workshop on Learning for TAMP! (Update: the work was also honored with the ‘Best Paper’ award!)
  • I’m giving an invited talk on “Inventing Plannable Abstractions from Demonstrations” at the Brown University Robotics group meeting!
  • Our paper on inventing predicates for TAMP from demonstrations will be presented as an Oral at AAAI 2023! Come check out the talk and poster + chat with my coauthors and I if you’re attending!
  • An article I wrote about my path to MIT got published in the Tech Review Alumni Magazine! Check it out here.