Team


Punit Bhatt

Punit is a first-year graduate student pursuing his Master of Science in Computer Vision (MSCV) at Carnegie Mellon University. His current interests lie at the intersection of Computer Vision and Robotics. These include cross-domain applications of Computer Vision, especially transportation.

Previously, he worked on devising lightweight foreground detection pipelines at NTU, Singapore under Prof. Thambipillai Srikanthan. He also worked as a software engineer at Microsoft, India, from 2018-2021. The work primarily involved designing, implementing, and maintaining the architecture of large-scale cloud services in Azure.

Advisors

Sebastian Scherer

Sebastian Scherer is an Associate Research Professor at the Robotics Institute (RI) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). His research focuses on enabling autonomy for unmanned rotorcraft to operate at low altitude in cluttered environments. He and His team have shown the fastest and most tested obstacle avoidance on an Yamaha RMax (2006), the first obstacle avoidance for micro aerial vehicles in natural environments (2008), and the first (2010) and fastest (2014) automatic landing zone detection and landing on a full-size helicopter. Dr. Scherer received his B.S. in Computer Science, M.S. and Ph.D. in Robotics from CMU in 2004, 2007, and 2010. He is a Siebel scholar and a recipient of multiple paper awards and nominations, including AIAA@Infotech 2010 and FSR 2013. His research has been covered by the national and internal press including IEEE Spectrum, the New Scientist, Wired, der Spiegel, and the WSJ. His work on self-landing helicopters has received the Popular Science Best of What’s New 2010 Award and in Fall 2016 he demonstrated his inspection robots to President Obama.

Yaoyu Hu

Yaoyu Hu is a project scientist in the Field Robotics Center of the Robotics Institute at CMU. He received his Ph.D. degree in nuclear engineering (yeah, that’s true) from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He is always willing to experience, learn and implement the most awesome technology in the world. He is particularly interested in advancing artificial intelligence techniques and deploying and testing them in the real world.