Mythra V. Balakuntala

I am a Ph.D. Candidate at Purdue University, West Lafayette and a researcher at the Collaborative Robotics Lab, under the supervision of Prof. Richard Voyles. I am also serving as the Instructor for the Programming Robots with ROS (MFET442) course at Purdue. And I am the President and Founder of Purdue League of Robotic Engineers.

My research focuses on using human tutelage paradigms to teach robotic manipulators contact-rich tasks. To achieve this, I have proposed the “bi-directional coaching” model, which enables robots to both learn from and teach humans. This model formalizes coaching as a partially observable process, allowing the robot to learn from corrective feedback during the learning process. Additionally, I have proposed an inverse coaching model in which the robot agent can utilize its gained expertise from coaching to teach novice human collaborators through style-guided corrective feedback.

I have worked with a variety of physical robots from robotic arms to full scale racing vehicles. I am dedicated to finding innovative solutions at the intersection of robotics, computer vision, and deep reinforcement learning. In my free time, I enjoy hiking with my dog, cooking, baking, and traveling.

I am currently looking for full-time positions starting in May 2023. My CV can be found here - CV.