Hi. I am Athindran. I am currently a software engineer at Aurora innovation in Pittsburgh, PA. I was a sixth year PhD student in the department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. Peter Ramadge. My current research is focused on designing safety fallback mechanisms for autonomous systems with provable guarantees. I use various tools from classical control to enable these model-based safety filters to satisfy desirable properties such as smooth handover and robustness to imperfect physics-based models.

  CV    Github Profile     Google Scholar

Project pages

Fast, smooth and safe   

Probabilistic Safety with GP

Talks

Princeton ECE Pre-FPO

Princeton ORFE Deep Learning Theory Seminar

ACC 2021

CISS 2021

Journal Papers

  1. A. R. Kumar, K. -C. Hsu, P. J. Ramadge and J. F. Fisac, “Fast, Smooth, and Safe: Implicit Control Barrier Functions through Reach-Avoid Differential Dynamic Programming,” in IEEE Control Systems Letters, doi: 10.1109/LCSYS.2023.3292132 Link
  2. Liang Heng, Athindran Ramesh Kumar and Grace Xingxin Gao, Location Hash: Private Proximity Detection Using Partial GPS Information, IEEE Transactions on Aerospace and Electronic Systems. Dec. 2016. Link

Conference and Workshop Papers

  1. Ting-Han Fan, Athindran Ramesh Kumar, Peter J. Ramadge. “Safety Control for Prime Focus Spectrograph.” In 2022 56th Annual Conference on Information Sciences and Systems (CISS) (pp. 269-274). IEEE Link
  2. Athindran Ramesh Kumar, Sulin Liu, Jaime F. Fisac, Ryan P. Adams, Peter J. Ramadge. “ProBF: Probabilistic Safety Certificates with Barrier Functions.” Presented at SafeRL workshop at NeurIPS 2021. Link
  3. Athindran Ramesh Kumar, Balaraman Ravindran, and Anand Raghunathan. “Pack and detect: Fast object detection in videos using region-of-interest packing.” Proceedings of the ACM India Joint International Conference on Data Science and Management of Data. 2019. Link Featured in TechXplore

For full list, visit Google Scholar

Work Experience

Software Intern, Control at Aurora Innovation. May - Aug 2022

Implementation of a feature to improve longitudinal control of self-driving trucks

Research Intern, Nokia Bell Labs. June - Aug 2021

Reinforcement learning for a robotic arm

Research Engineer, Center of Excellence in Wireless Technology. April 2016 - June 2018

Frequency assignment techniques and path loss models for rural environments.

Tech Intern, Google StreetView, May-August 2014

Carrier phase positioning with GPS to achieve centimeter accurate positioning of StreetView cars.

Outside Work

Back in my undergraduate days, I was crazy about tennis and represented the institute at the inter-IIT sports meet and the inter-collegiate sports fest. I was also part of the gold medal winning team of Tapti hostel in Schroeter 2012.

I was also into app development in my undergraduate days. I helped build android apps for the institute technical and cultural festivals, Shaastra and Saarang.

I am big fan of all kinds of music and listen to all kinds of music from all different eras.

Contact

You can reach me through email at r[dot]athindran[at]gmail[dot]com.