Nikhil Varma Keetha

MS in Robotics @ The Robotics Institute, CMU • Wander into the unknown 🛣️

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Newell-Simon Hall, CMU

5000 Forbes Ave

Pittsburgh, PA 15232

Hello! I’m an MS student at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). I have an innate passion for understanding how human perception and navigation works and how we can build real-world deployable autonomous systems with a positive societal impact. In pursuit of this passion, I am very interested in research on Perception, Computer Graphics, Cognitive Neuroscience, and their applications to robotics. At CMU, I’m a part of the AirLab advised by Prof. Sebastian Scherer.

I recently received a Bachelor’s degree in Engineering Physics from IIT (ISM) Dhanbad, India. During my undergrad, I had the pleasure to intern at Mila and QUT Centre for Robotics and was also a 2021 CMU Robotics Institute Summer Scholar.

I’m grateful to have wonderful mentors and collaborators including Sebastian Scherer, Liam Paull, Michael Milford, Sourav Garg, Krishna Murthy, Chen Wang, the GradSLAM community and other awesome researchers!

Apart from research, I’m a huge movie buff and find recreation in cooking, music, anime, and gaming.

news

Mar 14, 2023 Tartan Planning Series is now live!
Feb 14, 2023 ConceptFusion is public!
Feb 2, 2023 Received CMU RI PhD offer for Fall 2023!
Nov 1, 2022 Reviewing for CVPR 2023
Oct 15, 2022 Reviewed for IEEE ICRA 2023
Sep 1, 2022 RoboLaunch reached 13,000 students & viewers worldwide!
Jun 1, 2022 Organized the RoboLaunch Initiative at CMU
May 30, 2022 Graduated B.Tech with Distinction
Apr 11, 2022 Reviewed for ECCV 2022
Mar 23, 2022 Reviewed for IEEE IROS 2022
Mar 19, 2022 Accepted Fully-funded MS in Robotics offer from CMU!
Mar 4, 2022 AirObject accepted to CVPR 2022!
Oct 10, 2021 Reviewed for IEEE RA-L & ICRA 2022
Sep 27, 2021 Presented HEAPUtil at IROS 2021
Aug 10, 2021 Presented RISS Summer Experience as a part of the 2021 RISS Community Seminar Series
Jun 14, 2021 HEAPUtil accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) and IROS 2021!
May 1, 2021 Organizing the Tartan SLAM Series at CMU Robotics Institute
Apr 1, 2021 Interning at the AirLab CMU mentored by Dr. Chen Wang and Prof. Sebastian Scherer
Mar 25, 2021 Reviewed for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) & IROS 2021
Mar 18, 2021 Selected as a CMU Robotics Institute Summer Scholar!

selected publications

  1. AirObject: A Temporally Evolving Graph Embedding for Object Identification
    Keetha, N. V., Wang, C., Qiu, Y., Xu, K., and Scherer, S.
    In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition 2022
  2. A Hierarchical Dual Model of Environment- and Place-specific Utility for Visual Place Recognition
    Keetha, N. V., Milford, M., and Garg, S.
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L) & IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2021