About Me
Hello, Thank you for stopping by. I am Phani Kiran, a roboticist and grad student at Northwestern University. I am currently working on building a high-fidelity simulation of Northwestern’s DexNex — a bimanual dexterous teleoperation robot. The goal is to enable hardware-in-the-loop testing in Drake simulator interfaced with ROS, and in parallel, I am building a reinforcement learning pipeline by interfacing it with Open AI’s Gym to train policies for autonomous task execution and sim-to-real transfer.
Before Northwestern, I worked full-time at Airbus. I started in avionics, contributing to safety-critical software for the warning systems of A320, A330, and A340 aircraft. Later, I transitioned into robotics to follow my passion—collaborating with research labs and teams across Airbus and contributing to the open-source Humanoid Path Planner Library.
My hands-on experience with real robots comes from my time at Airbus, my graduate studies at Northwestern, and my undergraduate studies at IIT Kharagpur. I am particularly interested in learning, control, planning and their applications in robotics.
If you are curious about my work, want to collaborate, or just feel like saying hello—I will be glad to hear from you.
Education
Work Experience
IISc, Bangalore
May, 2017 - July, 2017
Research Intern, Integrated Control, Guidance and Estimation Lab