IU SMART Lab Team

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Vishnunandan Venkatesh

Vishnu became a SMART Lab alumni in August 2025.
His immediate position is an Engineer at Hitachi Astemo.

Education:
 Ph.D. Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 2025 (Technology)
Dissertation: "Intuitive Learning in Multi-Robot Systems"
M.S. Rochester Institute of Technology, 2018 (Electrical Engineering)
B.Tech VIT University, Vellore, India, 2015 (Electronics & Communication Engineering)

 
Research Interests:
  • Robot Learning
  • Human Robot Interaction
  • Machine Vision
  • Manipulation

Selected Publications: (Google Scholar)
  • Balakuntala, Mythra V., Vishnunandan LN Venkatesh, Jyothsna Padmakumar Bindu, Richard M. Voyles, and Juan Wachs. "Extending policy from one-shot learning through coaching." In 2019 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN), pp. 1-7. IEEE, 2019.
  • A. Praveen, X. Ma, H. Manoj, V. L. Venkatesh, M. Rastgaar and R. M. Voyles, "Inspection-on-the-fly using Hybrid Physical Interaction Control for Aerial Manipulators," 2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2020, pp. 1583-1588, doi: 10.1109/IROS45743.2020.9341397.
  • Glebys T Gonzalez, Upinder Kaur, Masudur Rahman, Vishnunandan Venkatesh, Natalia Sanchez, Gregory Hager, Yexiang Xue, Richard Voyles, Juan Wachs, "From the Dexterous Surgical Skill to the Battlefield—A Robotics Exploratory Study", Military Medicine, Volume 186, Issue Supplement_1, January-February 2021, Pages 288–294, https://doi.org/10.1093/milmed/usaa253
  • Md Masudur Rahman, Mythra V. Balakuntala, Glebys Gonzalez, Mridul Agarwal, Upinder Kaur, Vishnunandan L. N. Venkatesh, Natalia Sanchez-Tamayo, Yexiang Xue, Richard M. Voyles, Vaneet Aggarwal & Juan Wachs, "SARTRES: a semi-autonomous robot teleoperation environment for surgery", Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering: Imaging & Visualization, 9:4, 376-383, 2021, DOI: 10.1080/21681163.2020.1834878
  • Madapana, Naveen, Md Masudur Rahman, Natalia Sanchez-Tamayo, Mythra V. Balakuntala, Glebys Gonzalez, Jyothsna Padmakumar Bindu, LN Vishnunandan Venkatesh et al. "Desk: A robotic activity dataset for dexterous surgical skills transfer to medical robots." In 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), pp. 6928-6934. IEEE, 2019.

Posters:
  • Vishnunandan .L.N. Venkatesh, J. P. Bindu, “Functional Inspection-on-the-Fly of Deformable Objects using Tactile Perception”, in ICRA 2019 ViTac Workshop.

Contact:
    lvenkate at purdue dot edu