Gokul Puthumanaillam
PhD Student, Roboticist and C++ enthusiast

I am a PhD student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign where I work with Prof. Melkior Ornik in the LEADCAT research group. I finished my bachelors in Electronics and Communications Engineering with a minors in Computational Mathematics. My current research emphasizes decision making and planning for long-term autonomous tasks in probabilistic and algorithmic robotics (in highly adversarial environments). I am passionate about developing software for hardware, open-source contributions and translating complex theories into practical applications.

I enjoy reading books¹, playing competitive chess and also (sometimes) video games². I also play the Guitar and the Ukulele!

I was introduced to Linux at the age of 7 and never turned back: I love terminals! I have been using Vim for the past 10 years now, mostly because I spent the first 2 years figuring out how to exit it (ironically this website is built using Emacs)!

Hopefully, there will be time for everything.

• 03/08/2024: Our paper on "ComTraQ-MPC: Meta-Trained DQN-MPC Integration for Trajectory Tracking with Limited Active Localization Updates" is under review at 2024 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2024)
• 📖 30/01/2024: I cleared my PhD Qualifying Exam!
• 🎉 01/28/2024: Our paper on "Weathering ongoing uncertainty: learning and planning in a time-varying partially observable environment" has been accepted at the 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)!!!
• 🎉 04/05/2024: Our paper on "A dynamic area approximation based stochastic multi-UAV target search with noisy measurements" has been accepted at 2024 IEEE International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS)!!!
• 🎉 12/22/2023: Our paper on "Assured collision avoidance for learned controllers" has been accepted at 2024 Enabling Technologies for AAM Autonomy, AIAA SciTech!
• 🎉 12/01/2023: Our paper on "Online learning and planning in time-varying environments: an aircraft case study" has been accepted at 2024 AIAA-SIAM Managing Uncertainties in Cyber-Physical-Human Decision-Making!
• 🎉 06/10/2023: Our paper on "Texture based prototypical network for few-shot semantic segmentation of forest cover: generalizing for different geographical regions" has been awarded the Best Paper Award at IEEE GRSS. Paper also accepted at Neurocomputing!
• 🎉 05/10/2023: Our paper on "Improved semantic segmentation for identification of flooded regions in UAV aerial images: a transformer-based approach" has been accepted at IGARSS 2023-2023 IEEE International Geoscience and Remote Sensing Symposium!

I'm passionate about open-source software. Reference implementations of all algorithms I designed so far at LEADCAT are publicly available. I additionally contributed features and bug-fixes to various other projects, including Webots, Ardupilot and Arduino.

Here are some other projects that I maintain or plan to release soon:

• Released: ROS2 drivers for u-blox ZED F9P GPS receivers (v1.0.0 released: 07/10/2023 - Find it here).
• Upcoming: Vim plugin for ROS2 developers (expected release date: 02/03/2024)
• Upcoming: ROS2 based exoplanet space exploration robot with time varying environment (expected completion date: 02/21/2024)

• This site is nothing more than a collection of org-mode files, exported using org-publish inside of Emacs and hosted by Github Pages.
• Since I sometimes make quite elementary mistakes, I'm sorry for my word crimes.
• I have a collection of mismatched socks that I refuse to throw away because I'm convinced the other sock will turn up eventually.
• Last updated: 2/12/2024, 17:09:32