CV
Education, research experience, manuscripts, projects, teaching, and service. A PDF version is available via the download button.
Contact Information
| Name | Sourav Selvaraj |
| Professional Title | M.S. Robotics Engineering Student |
| sselvaraj@wpi.edu |
Professional Summary
Research interests: legged robotics, whole-body control, and robot learning. Recent work spans force-regulated body contact on quadruped hardware (SCRUB), learned footstep planning (GaitNet), and reinforcement learning for humanoids.
Experience
-
2025 - present Worcester, MA
Graduate Researcher — SCRUB, Armless Quadruped Body-Tool Sliding
ALMaS Research Group, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Advisor: Dr. Mahdi Agheli
-
2025 - 2026 Worcester, MA
Graduate Researcher — GaitNet, RL Footstep Planning
ALMaS Research Group, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Advisor: Dr. Mahdi Agheli
-
2024 - 2025 Tiruchirappalli, India
-
2023 - 2023 Chennai, India
Research Intern — Bio-mimetic Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (BAUV)
IIT Madras
Advisor: Dr. Asokan Thondiyath
Education
-
2025 - 2027 Worcester, MA
-
2021 - 2025 Tiruchirappalli, India
Bachelor of Technology
National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli
Instrumentation and Control Engineering
- CGPA: 8.2/10.0
Awards
-
2026 Dr. Glenn Yee Graduate Student Tuition Award
Robotics Engineering Department, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Competitive merit-based award for outstanding RBE graduate students, selected on research record — publications and successful projects — and academic standing. Carries one tuition credit for the Fall 2026 semester.
-
2023 Winner, Smart India Hackathon 2023
Ministry of Education, India
Nationwide student innovation competition.
Publications
-
2026 SCRUB: Surface Contact Regulation Using the Body for Armless Quadruped Force–Motion Control
Manuscript
S. Selvaraj and M. Agheli.
-
2026 GaitNet: Learning-Based Acyclic Footstep Planning for Dynamic Quadruped Locomotion
Manuscript
O. Sullivan*, S. Selvaraj*, and M. Agheli (*equal contribution).
Projects
-
Simulated Ice-Skating Locomotion for Humanoids via Blade-Contact RL (Jul 2026 – present)
Unitree G1 trained with PPO in MuJoCo to skate on passive 3 mm blades without imitation data; the skating gait emerges from anisotropic blade–ice contact. Tracks a 0.9 m/s command within 0.09 m/s at 94% single support.
-
Simulated Bimanual Lifting for Humanoids via Residual AMP–PPO (May 2026 – Jul 2026)
Unitree G1 trained to lift objects with residual AMP–PPO over a frozen locomotion actor, holding them within 3 cm of target using adaptive curricula and dynamics randomization.
-
Conditional Flow Matching Policies for Robot Manipulation (Apr 2026 – May 2026)
Conditional Flow Matching visuomotor policy built from scratch in robomimic — 11× faster inference than 100-step DDPM Diffusion Policy on the same backbone, with equal or higher success on the tasks compared head-to-head.
-
Acrobatic Quadrotor Control with L1 Adaptive Augmentation (Oct 2025 – Dec 2025)
SE(3) geometric controller with L1 adaptive augmentation for a Crazyflie 2.1 in ROS 2 simulation — 2.2 cm position RMSE, up to 94% of force-step disturbances rejected.
-
Autonomous Rover — ISRO Robotics Challenge 2024 (Dec 2022 – Aug 2024)
6-wheeled rocker-bogie autonomous rover with ORB-SLAM terrain mapping, kinodynamic path planning, and custom control electronics.
-
Additional projects
Visuomotor imitation learning — Behavior Cloning vs. Diffusion Policy on robosuite (code); task-and-motion planning — PDDL + OMPL block assembly on a Franka Panda.
Teaching Experience
- Teaching Assistant & Laboratory Curriculum Developer — RBE 521: Legged Robotics, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, May – Aug 2026. Instructor: Dr. Mahdi Agheli. Developed hands-on lab modules using Unitree Go1 and G1 robots.
Academic Service & Leadership
- Reviewer, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE), Jan – Feb 2026.
- Team Lead, ISRO Robotics Challenge 2024, NIT Trichy, Dec 2022 – Aug 2024. Led a 10-member team building an autonomous rover.