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Biography
I am an Associate Professor of Robotics and AI, with my primary affiliation with the Cyber-physical Health and Assistive Robotics Technologies (CHART) group. With over 15 years of experience in Robotics and AI covering all aspects, including navigation, manipulation, mechanism design, machine learning, computer vision, and mixed reality, I have focused on applications in surgical robotics, telerobotics, therapy, and occupational training, among others.
Prior to joining CS @ Nottingham, I was a Researcher, non-tenured (2018-2023), at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT), Genova, Italy, leading the VICARIOS Mixed Reality and Simulations Lab, where my research focused on mixed reality (MR) for immersive remote telerobotics in hazardous environments, which touched on topics including 3D vision and semantic scene understanding for real-time visualisation in MR, haptics and MR for training, control simulations for novel robotic devices, etc. I have been organising the XR-ROB workshop, which is the only gathering of its kind at the IEEE/RSJ IROS international conference exploring the confluence of extended reality (XR) and robotics technologies. I have been PI and co-I for multiple collaborative projects, with R&D funding exceeding €7 million, focused on telerobotics in hazardous environments, digital twins for intelligent therapy, and industrial worker training. I have worked closely with stakeholders, including firefighters and construction workers, and demonstrated the project outcomes in public dissemination events, including to the President of Italy in 2022.
Before this, I was a Postdoctoral fellow (2012-2017) in telesurgery at IIT, Italy, where I developed novel mechanisms in surgical robotics, as well as investigated the development of intuitive surgeon-robot interfaces using mixed reality. This work was carried out in close collaboration with expert surgeons at the San Martino hospital in Genova, Italy, and led to the first successful demonstration of live 5G telesurgery in Italy in 2019.
I received my PhD in Electrical Engineering, with a focus on Robotics, in 2012, from the North Carolina State University (NCSU), USA, my Master's in Integrated Manufacturing Systems Engineering in 2007, from NCSU itself, and my Bachelor's in Electrical Engineering in 2003 from the College of Engineering (COEP), Pune, India.
I am editor / associate editor for several conferences including IEEE ICRA, IROS, MFI, AIR, etc., and reviewer and special issue editor at journals including IEEE T-RO, RAS, Frontiers, etc.