Mosam Dabhi
Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology Surat, India
Robust Adaptive Systems Lab, The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

I recently completed my bachelors in the Electronics and Communication Engineering at Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat with my undergraduate thesis on Precision farming using Autonomous aerial vehicles. My current research focus is real-time planning and control, primarily applied to aerial/ground vehicles operating in challenging, real-world environments with limited computational resources.

I am motivated by researching and developing new technologies which can improve the world around me, and help me learn new findings every day. I intend to make the world a better and safer place to live, through some cutting edge innovations in the field of robotics. Enjoy understanding how things work and get a hold of solution for difficult problems. I like to see the big picture, but am also immensely fascinated by the small details. I always get inspired by watching fresh ideas become new realities and am also passionate about spreading my enthusiasm for technology with others.

My undergraduate thesis dealt with creating precision farming solutions using autonomous hexacopter. We came up with this product looking at the irregularities and hardships faced by Indian farmers due to multiple factors(especially due to multiple uncertain conditions) leading to a decrease in crop harvests. We created a minimum viable product(MVP) ready to be used in the market at the end, tested it with multiple farmers around Surat and received satisfactory results as well as positive responses from the farmers. More detail about this project can be found on my website.

The knowledge base for my undergraduate project was obtained from the work I did in RISS Cohort 2016, funded by NASA. Generating feasible and safe trajectories in cluttered environments was computationally expensive due to the need of considering a large number of obstacles and perceptual uncertainty. This project dealt with planning collision free aggressive trajectories in such unknown environments which is extremely crucial in search and rescue operations or surveillance operations in the real world. Please check out RISS 2016 poster for more details.

The RISS 2017 project, funded by NASA looks at learning new control strategies and policies as we go, but do so in a rigorous manner so we don’t crash the vehicle as we’re trying to learn. The underlying idea of this project is to leverage past experiences to reduce the computation needed to generate new control commands. Looking at different flight and control strategies we realized that control was really the limiting factor, because we don’t have a good way to compensate for these types of disturbances, imminent in real world situations. No matter what sort of circumstance we’re working in, we want to be able to learn a custom set of behaviors for the scenario, while having a severely computationally constrained platform.

I enjoy traveling and exploring new places. I hope to utilize technology as a tool to help people from unprivileged background and build things which pushes the human civilization forward. Pursuing a doctorate course in this field helps me bring a step closer towards my goals. Help from FICCI and RISS motivates me to work towards my aspirations. When not playing with computers and circuits, I enjoy exploring new restaurants, hiking mountains, watching Iron Man movies and jogging along the arrival of dawn.

Personal Website url:
New: https://mosamdabhi.github.io/
Old : http://mosamdabhi.wixsite.com/mosamdabhi1711