Kanishk Navale

About Me

Before code or robots, there were pencils and sketches, my first tools for understanding the world. Designing & imagining structures led me into robotics, where ideas transformed into moving, tactile systems. AI expanded that horizon, giving me the ability to build machines that not only act, but also perceive and learn. I’m growing by embracing the fusion of art, mechanics, and intelligence.

Projects

Here are a few hand-picked projects of mine.

Delta Robot

Boogie Springerland

Fine Arts

Delta Robot

Delta Robot

Motion Control

Delta Robot

Robot Physics Engine

Constrained Optimization

Delta Robot

AI for Robot Tasks

Deep RL for Robot Task Planning

Delta Robot

Single Label Object Grasping

Object Aware Robot Control

Career Odyssey

Mirrors of my professional journey, highlighting key roles and experiences.

Sereact GmbH. Senior Deep Learning Engineer 11.2022 – 01.2024, Stuttgart - Germany

Led the design & development of a vision-based LLM for robots. Initially, fine-tuned a foundation model with LoRA. Later, integrated it with a 'Point Transformer-2' architecture using modified geodesic multi-head self-attention for enhanced robot & object interaction boosting number of pick & place operations.

Sereact GmbH. Master Thesis Student 05.2022 – 11.2022, Stuttgart - Germany

Developed an end-to-end deep learning model that regresses the generalised object representations as visual dense descriptors (embeddings) while additionally regressing object pose invariant 3D keypoints. The DNN (Deep Neural Network) was optimised using a self-supervised geometry aware loss functions, eliminating the need for manual annotated labels. The master thesis was awarded a '1.3' which is an excellent grade.

Bosch Center for Artificial Intelligence Intern - Reinforcement Learning & Planning 11.2021 – 04.2022, Renningen - Germany

Implemented oriented bounding-box pruning & grouping for visual object pose registration using a DNN regressed feature space. The DNN feature space was optimized on the pixelwise distributional loss & agglomerative hierarchical clustering.

Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems Wissenschaftliche Hilfskraft 04.2021 – 10.2021, Stuttgart - Germany

Integrated a robot physics engine from scratch, introducing hybrid motion force control to the NYU-Finger robot (a leg of a quadruped robot) with the in-house fabricated capacitive haptic sensor with robust real-time state estimation.

FANUC India Pvt. Ltd. Robot System Engineer 06.2016 – 08.2018, Bangalore - India

Commissioned 48 industrial robots, 2D/3D vision, machine tending & IoT systems as part of the design & site deployment team. The technical & commercial proposals pitched generated revenues more than the set yearly target.

School Compass

These schools I attended are roots for my professional journey.

Computer Science - Autonomous Systems Master of Science (M.Sc.), Universität Stuttgart 10.2019 – 10.2022, Stuttgart - Germany

Improved robot path planning by 60% fewer episode lengths using DDPG agent equipped with PER + HER + PENE methodologies using Tensorflow 2 & PyTorch. Furthermore, designed information maximization variation encoder (Info-VAE) for high data dimensional analysis & decomposition to its latent state, securing top-1 in the class.

Automation & Robotics Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.), BVBCET 06.2012 – 06.2016, Hubli - India

Led student team of size 10 to participate in ABU-Robocon international event engineering 2 badminton playing robot. Furthermore, built a delta-style parallel robot for the bachelor's capstone project. Graduated with '8.99' CGPA which is equivalent to 'First Class with Distinction'.

Stuttgart, DE 🇩🇪