Chaitanya

Solo

An autonomous unmanned ground vehicle built with Project Manas for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition (IGVC) at Oakland University. Helped win IGVC 2019 and several other awards.

Solo is an autonomous unmanned ground vehicle built by Project Manas, the student robotics team at Manipal, for the Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition — an annual event at Oakland University, Michigan, where teams put fully autonomous vehicles through an outdoor obstacle course: lane following, obstacle avoidance and waypoint navigation, with no driver and no remote control.

My work was on perception and navigation: turning raw camera and LiDAR output into a usable picture of the course, and that picture into a route the vehicle could actually take.

Project Manas took first place with Solo at IGVC 2019, along with several other awards that year.

• Instagram: reel ↗
• Instagram: post ↗

SAMIS

A smartphone-based vein-imaging system that uses visible-spectrum image processing to visualize subcutaneous veins without IR hardware, aimed at making IV access easier for nurses. Won Second Place Grand Award in Biomedical Engineering at Intel ISEF 2017 and the Grand Award at IRIS 2016.

SAMIS is an Android app that uses image processing algorithms to visualize subcutaneous veins in an image of the body of a user taken using a regular smartphone camera. SAMIS utilizes the fact that different wavelengths of light interact in different ways with biological tissue to extract vein information.

It is particularly challenging to do on a regular, unmodified smartphone camera because the range of wavelengths of light a smartphone can capture excludes the infrared spectrum, where vein details are simpler to extract. Since IR data is unavailable, SAMIS uses the more subtle variations detectable in the visible spectrum to help visualize vein patterns.

SAMIS can potentially be used to help nurses make the process of finding veins for administering intravenous injections less error-prone. This is useful for individuals whose veins are hard to find using conventional methods, and it is potentially useful for diagnosing conditions like varicose veins. Systems like SAMIS, developed on off-the-shelf, easily accessible hardware, can bring down the cost of medical diagnostics and give doctors and clinics in less affluent regions access to useful tools.

Geeve George and I built SAMIS together. It won the Grand Award at IRIS 2016 in Pune, and the following year the Second Place Grand Award in Biomedical Engineering at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) in Los Angeles.

• Intel: feature story ↗
• IRIS National (X) ↗
• The Hindu: coverage ↗

Magniwear

An AR/VR microscope on the Google Cardboard platform, operated hands-free by voice while exploring biological samples, doubling as a dental loupe and a live-streaming tool for remote guidance. Selected top 90 globally, Google Science Fair 2015.

Magniwear is an AR/VR microscope built on the Google Cardboard platform. It allows the user to operate a microscope hands-free using voice commands while wearing it on their head, and explore biological samples in a virtual reality environment. This makes Magniwear useful as an educational tool, letting children explore the microscopic world from a first-person view.

It can also function as a dental loupe, or as a tool for viewing small samples using the included lens system. Its AR features help the user highlight useful detail. It also allows streaming what the user sees to others over the internet, which makes Magniwear useful during operations and other tasks where experts can look at what the user is seeing and provide real-time guidance.

I worked on Magniwear with my friend Geeve George, and we were selected as one of the top 90 globally in the Google Science Fair 2015.

ProxyTalk

A real-time voice-agent platform: a streaming ASR → LLM → TTS pipeline over SIP/WebSocket with VAD, turn-taking, and barge-in, built on the OpenAI APIs. Sub-1,000ms p95 end-to-end latency.

ProxyTalk is a real-time voice-agent platform. Audio arrives over SIP or a WebSocket and moves through a streaming pipeline — speech recognition, then an LLM, then speech synthesis — with voice activity detection, turn-taking and barge-in handling wrapped around it so a caller can interrupt mid-sentence and the agent yields immediately.

The hard part of a system like this is not any single stage, it is the latency budget across all of them: every stage has to stream rather than wait for completion, and the end-to-end p95 has to stay under a second for the conversation to feel natural.

• GitHub: proxytalk_service ↗

Minor Planet (34016) Chaitanya

Named by MIT Lincoln Laboratory's Ceres Connection program, following the Second Place Grand Award in Biomedical Engineering at Intel ISEF 2017.

(34016) Chaitanya is a main-belt asteroid, provisionally designated 2000 OY16 and first observed in 1990. It orbits the Sun once every 3.34 years on a mildly eccentric path that carries it between 1.87 and 2.60 astronomical units — out past Mars, through the asteroid belt, well inside Jupiter.

It was named through the Ceres Connection, a programme run by MIT Lincoln Laboratory that names minor planets discovered by its LINEAR survey after students who place at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair. The name followed the Second Place Grand Award in Biomedical Engineering at ISEF 2017, for SAMIS.

The orbit below is drawn from the real orbital elements published in JPL's Small-Body Database, projected onto the ecliptic. The marked position is where the asteroid actually is today.

• JPL Small-Body Database ↗

3 patents filed

Filed at Microsoft, for risk assessment and mitigation recommendations in projects, and for better context extraction for task execution.

Three patents filed while at Microsoft. The first, Method and System of Intelligent Risk Analysis and Risk Mitigation for a Project, covers surfacing the risks in a plan and recommending what to do about them rather than simply flagging them. The other two cover contextual task execution — getting an agent to gather the right context before it acts, so that the action it takes is grounded in the actual state of the work rather than the prompt alone.

5× hackathon winner

Microsoft internal hackathon wins, with multiple ideas adopted into the product roadmap.

Five wins across Microsoft's internal hackathons. Several of the ideas did not stop at the hackathon — they were picked up into the product roadmap and shipped, which is the part that actually mattered.

1st Place — Intelligent Ground Vehicle Challenge, 2019

IGVC at Oakland University, Michigan, with Project Manas — the team behind Solo, the autonomous ground vehicle.

IGVC is an annual competition at Oakland University, Michigan, where teams build fully autonomous ground vehicles and run them through an outdoor obstacle course: lane following, obstacle avoidance, waypoint navigation, all without a driver.

Project Manas took first place in 2019 with Solo. I worked on the perception and navigation side — the parts responsible for making sense of what the cameras and LiDAR were reporting, and turning that into somewhere safe to drive.

Top 90 Globally — Google Science Fair, 2015

Named a Regional Finalist — one of 90 selected worldwide — for Magniwear, the Google Cardboard AR/VR microscope.

The Google Science Fair ran globally, with entries judged down to 90 regional finalists worldwide. Magniwear — an AR/VR microscope built on Google Cardboard, operated by voice — made that cut.

The certificate is signed off by Google, LEGO Education, National Geographic, Scientific American and Virgin Galactic, who ran the fair together.