Welcome!
I am Umashankar Nagarajan, a robotics researcher who is interested in developing balancing robots that move with speed and agility.
Currently, I am working as a Postdoctoral Associate in Robotics at Disney Research, Pittsburgh, USA with Katsu Yamane (Senior Research Scientist) on legged balancing robots.
In July 2012, I finished my PhD in Robotics at The Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Pittsburgh, USA. I worked with Ralph Hollis (Research Professor) and George Kantor (Systems Scientist) on wheeled balancing robots with special emphasis on a robot called Ballbot (shown in the picture), a human-sized mobile robot that balances on a single ball. My work primarily focused on developing control and planning algorithms for fast, dynamic and graceful motions of wheeled balancing robots.
I did my undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering at Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India. I worked with Himanshu Dutt Sharma (Scientist, Central Electronics Engineering Research Institute and an ex-faculty of BITS) on the Autonomous Bicycle project, which is also a balancing mobile robot.