About Me

šŸ‘‹ Hi, Iā€™m Saswati , a roboticist. I spend my days teaching robots how to walk, talk, and occasionally fall down with dignity.šŸ˜‚

I am a Phd student of Computer Science at University At Albany - State University of New York. I am a researcher in the Robotics, Algorithm and Computable Systems (RACS) Laboratory working under the supervision of Dr. Chinwe Ekenna.My research is primarily focused on mobile robotics, with a particular emphasis on autonomous navigation. A broader objective of my work is to design systems that can be used by individuals irrespective of their technical expertise. Instead of relying heavily on coordinates, actuators, and sensor-based navigation commands, I aim to develop robotic systems capable of interpreting and executing instructions expressed in natural human language.

This research is driven by several key questions:

  1. How can robots be trained to understand essential phrases in human instructions?
  2. What should constitute the key phrases for navigation tasks?
  3. Given that the user already provides guidance on how the robot should move within the environment, how can path-planning methodologies be optimized?

To address these questions, I employ Named Entity Recognition (NER), a widely used method in natural language processing, to identify critical phrases in navigation commands and map them to a motion planner for generating collision-free trajectories. Since the robot receives explicit guidance on the types of turns required to reach the destination, my work focuses on generating samples within a relevant subset of the environment rather than across the entire workspace. This approach makes the planner both sample-efficient and time-efficient. Consequently, my current research represents an integration of artificial intelligence and robotics, uniting natural language understanding with efficient sampling-based path planning.

I graduated from University At Southern Mississippi with an MS degree in Computer Science. I completed my MS thesis under the guidance of Dr. Chaoyang Zhang (Joe Zhang). The focus of my research was a comparative study of various machine learning methods. As the outcome of my research, I successfully predicted suicidal tendencies among youth.
Last but not least, I am an avid reader with a particular love for detective fiction. My collection includes works by authors such as Dan Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Satyajit Ray, Sunil Gangopadhyay, Samaresh Majumdar, and Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay, among many others.