Chinmay Prashanth

Experience

Internships & experience

Research labs, startups, and industry — across the US and India.

  1. EcoRobotics Lab, ASU

    Jan 2026 – Present · Mesa, AZ

    Graduate Research Associate

    • Doctoral research in autonomous robotics for real-world environmental applications — soil remediation and field robotics.
    • Developing robotics systems across simulation, sensing integration, and prototyping toward deployable platforms.
  2. Freelance — Contract Work

    Aug 2025 – Dec 2025 · Remote

    Robotics Simulation & VLA Data Engineer

    • Built simulation-based data workflows for training foundation Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models.
    • Turned robot task demonstrations, environment variations, and action-observation logs into structured datasets for imitation learning.
    • Added data-quality checks for episode consistency, action-label alignment, and success/failure filtering with reproducible dataset generation.
  3. Upsurge Labs

    Dec 2024 – Jul 2025

    Robotics & Mechatronics Engineer

    • Trained RL-based table-tennis robot policies (PPO) in NVIDIA Isaac Sim for racket motion and ball-return behavior — strong performance in simulation.
    • Designed a custom 6-DOF arm (URDF modeling, joint tuning, ESP32/Jetson targets) with ROS/MoveIt planning and PID/impedance control in simulation.
    • Real-world deployment was limited by high-speed perception hardware constraints; shifted to generating Isaac Sim datasets in LeRobot format — using Black Coffee Robotics' bcr_bot — for NVIDIA GR00T N1 VLA training.
  4. Space Dynamics & Flight Control Lab, IIT Kanpur

    Oct 2024 – Dec 2024 · Kanpur, India

    Junior Research Fellow

    • Built an instrumented single-wheel test setup for rover wheel–terrain interaction on loose, sandy terrain.
    • Developed a MATLAB EKF-based slip estimation and detection algorithm from testbed sensor data; the lab's paper built on this testbed won Best Paper (Docking & Rover Technologies) at IEEE SPACE 2025.
    • Developed a six-wheeled rocker-bogie rover prototype and investigated wheel–terrain interaction models.
  5. NYU Tandon Future Labs — A/X Venture Studio

    Jan 2024 – Jul 2024 · Brooklyn, NY

    Venture Fellow · Researcher & Product Developer

    • Led medical robotics research for a robotic-assisted surgical catheter, collaborating with the NYU Langone Aortic Center.
    • Prototyped cable-actuated end effectors (additive manufacturing + electro-mechanical integration) and ran biocompatibility and sterilization studies.
    • Refined designs with surgeons and clinicians; analyzed FDA 510(k)/CE regulatory pathways and commercialization potential.
  6. Bharat Electronics Ltd.

    Apr 2021 – May 2021 · Bengaluru, India

    Research Intern, Advanced Defense Systems — Naval Radars

    • Contributed to the design and development of radar hubs for naval ships.
    • Modeled functional units in SolidWorks and ran simulations in ANSYS across the radar-hub lifecycle.

Education

Arizona State University — Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering

PhD, Robotics and Autonomous Systems

Jan 2026 – Jan 2031 (expected)

Doctoral research at the EcoRobotics Lab (Mesa, AZ): autonomous robotics for environmental applications — soil remediation and field robotics.

New York University — Tandon School of Engineering

M.S., Mechatronics and Robotics

Sep 2022 – May 2024

Explainable autonomous robots research (IEEE RO-MAN 2024, U.S. provisional patent) and medical robotics with NYU Langone via Future Labs.

Dayananda Sagar College of Engineering, Bengaluru

B.E., Mechanical Engineering

Aug 2018 – May 2022

Foundation in mechanical design, FEA, and manufacturing.