Karteek Gandiboyina | Robotics Engineer

Work Experience

Rational CyPhy Inc. Feb 2026 – Present

Robotics Engineer

Architected a resilient autonomy stack for NASA-aligned wildfire-suppression UAVs on VOXL 2, targeting BVLOS operation in GPS-denied environments.
Fused Basalt VIO with GPS; designed seamless sensor failover for stable flight under degraded conditions.
Deployed real-time 3DGS for aerial environment reconstruction, delivering high-fidelity situational awareness to emergency responders.
Prototyped self-organizing multi-drone architectures for mission continuity during comms/GPS outages.

Coordinated Science Lab, UIUC — Prof. Sayan Mitra Sept 2025 – Jan 2026

Graduate Research Assistant

Trained a DreamerV3 World Model on Crazyflie FPV data for imagination-based policy training without direct environment interaction.
Built a 6-DoF pose estimation pipeline using 3DGS-generated synthetic datasets (10k frames) + fine-tuned U-Net; achieved sub-centimeter accuracy in sim-to-real transfer.
Developed actor-critic (PPO) policy within latent world model; increased waypoint completion 70% → 95%.
Designed min-snap trajectory planners with differential flatness, reducing planning time by 30%.

Konica Minolta — R&D Headquarters, Tokyo, Japan Jul 2021 – Aug 2024

R&D Robotics Engineer

Structured-light point cloud sensor achieving 0.99 IoU on 1 cm² items at 0.05 m under <10 Lux for bin-picking of reflective industrial components.
Auto-annotation pipeline (SAM, Detectron2, YOLOv7) reducing manual labeling time by >80%.
Language-conditioned multi-task RL (SAC + DAgger) with Georgia Tech; improved zero-shot task success by 200%.
Collaborated with JAXA on vision-based 6-DoF grasping for multi-limbed robots aboard the ISS.
Filed 2 patents in computer vision and robotic grasping (USPTO & JPO).

Philips Innovation Campus — Bangalore, India Apr 2020 – Jul 2020

Machine Learning Intern

3D residual U-Net for pulmonary nodule detection on 888 CT scans (LUNA16); FROC score 0.914, surpassing baseline by 8%.

Education

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA Aug 2024 – Dec 2025

MS in Autonomy & Robotics — GPA: 3.89 / 4.0

Deep Learning for Graphs · Computer Vision · Safe Autonomy · Deep Generative Models

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, India Aug 2017 – May 2021

B.Tech. in Electrical Engineering — GPA: 3.48 / 4.0

Deep Learning · Machine Learning · Embedded Systems · Control Systems

Projects

Autonomous Drone Racing

MPC & PID spline tracker for autonomous gate navigation. NanoSAM keypoint detector for misaligned gate correction.

Race record: 50.13 s (Tier-1) · Gate error: 0.05 m

MPCPIDNeRF AirSimNanoSAM

Code

VLM4Autonomy

SAM2 + optical flow + VLMs for real-time object tracking and ego-vehicle motion estimation. YOLOv8 & SfM for spatial grounding.

SAM2YOLOv8Optical Flow SfMVLMs

Code

Volatility-Aware Stock Prediction

Transformer-VAE with RealNVP normalizing flows conditioned on VIX. Outperforms TimeGrad & GARCH in distributional similarity.

Wasserstein: 0.0629 · Cosine Sim: 0.9072

PyTorchVAE RealNVPTransformers

Code

Patents & Publications

Conference Paper

FalconTrack: Photorealistic Auto-Labeled Perception and Physics-Aware Vision-Based Aerial Tracking

IROS 2026

Unified 3DGS-based simulator automating 6-DoF pose and mask labeling (10k images in <20 min), enabling zero-shot sim-to-real aerial tracking with 100% success on high-speed trajectories.

Patent — USPTO

Learning Data Generation Support Device, Movement Controller, and Article Acquisition System

US: 20250336175

Automated data generation framework eliminating manual labeling bottlenecks for complex 3D pick-and-place robotics in bulk manufacturing.

Patent — JPO

Component Posture Information Acquiring Device and Posture Determination Method

JPO: 2023-060687

Vision-based sensing system using ROI determination and feature extraction for accurate component posture estimation during robotic pick-and-place.

Skills

Computer Vision

3D Gaussian Splatting NeRF SLAM 6-DoF Pose Estimation YOLOv7/v8 Detectron2 SAM / SAM2 Point Clouds Optical Flow SfM Visual Odometry

Robotics & Autonomy

ROS / ROS2 MPC PID Min-Snap Trajectory VIO (Basalt) Quadrotor Control Robotic Manipulation Bin Picking AirSim MuJoCo MetaWorld

Machine Learning

PyTorch JAX CNNs Transformers VAEs Diffusion Models GNNs DreamerV3 Actor-Critic RL SAC DAgger LLMs / VLMs / VLAs

Languages & Tools

Python C++ Docker Linux Git VOXL 2