Shlok Mehndiratta

MOON Lab, IISER Bhopal • Undergraduate Research Student • Advisor: Dr. P. B. Sujit

• Implemented spherical coordinate-based vision planning with extensions for moving target tracking and dynamic obstacle avoidance for MAVs, validating algorithms on ROS 2 simulation environment.
• Concurrently assembling drone systems integrating flight controller, RC receiver, and telemetry modules; configuring and integrating OptiTrack mocap system with ROS for high-precision indoor localization during algorithm testing and validation.
• Progressing toward multi-agent coordination: investigating decentralized swarm algorithms for cooperative coverage and autonomous missions.

Robotics Research Center (RRC), IIIT Hyderabad • Research Intern • Advisor: Dr. Spandan Roy

• Building high-fidelity synthetic data engine generating paired multi-view RGB images, segmentation masks, and 3D contact/SDF supervision using GPU-accelerated physics (NVIDIA Warp) and photorealistic rendering (BlenderProc).
• Training vision-conditioned neural models (ResNet/UNet/PointNet) to predict 3D contact distributions from camera images, leveraging synthetic supervision for downstream grasp generation and real-robot policy transfer on 16-DoF LEAP Hand platforms.
• Targeting paper submission on learning-based contact prediction from visual data to top-tier robotics venues; scaling dataset generation across multi-GPU clusters for large-scale synthetic scene diversity.

MuSic Lab, IISER Bhopal • Undergraduate Research Student • Advisor: Dr. Arijit Sen

• Developed closed-form altitude scheduling policy for UAV-UGV cooperative tracking by formalizing the altitude-coverage-resolution coupling; built belief-space MPC controller and event-triggered aerial planner achieving 25× compute reduction while maintaining estimation quality.
• Constructed complete ROS 2/Gazebo testbed with unified logging protocol to validate theoretical predictions on sensor noise scaling, altitude optimality, and event-triggered performance across variable terrain curvature.

1. Shlok Mehndiratta, Divyam Sood, Prashant Gupta, Agniva Banerjee, Arijit Sen.

"COAST: Altitude as a Coupled Perception Variable in Shared-Camera Aerial-Ground Tracking."

Derived a closed-form altitude policy for shared-camera UAV-UGV tracking, where altitude trades off localization noise ($R \propto z^2$) against lane coverage. Validated in ROS 2/Gazebo; event-triggered planning cut aerial computation by 25× at matched estimation quality. [Accepted to ACODS 2026 (presenting Dec 2026)]

2. Santosh Tantravahi, Nirman Jaiswal, Shlok Mehndiratta, J. Leitner, Aditya Paranjape, P. B. Sujit.

"Multi-Robot Area Balancing in the Presence of Discrete Local Communication."

Developed a decentralized area-balancing algorithm for drone swarms under opportunistic local communication, alternating greedy and altruistic rules for fast convergence. Validated in 35+ Crazyflie flights (3–5 drones) and Gazebo/SITL wildfire missions. [Submitted to ICRA 2027]