Anoushka Alavilli

Hello! I am a third-year PhD student in the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, PA. I am co-advised by Professor Jeff Schneider and Professor Guanya Shi. My research is in reinforcement learning (RL) and optimal control for autonomous off-road driving. I am currently interested in sim-to-real challenges in this domain, including vision and deformable terrain.

Last summer, I interned at FieldAI, where I was advised by Shehryar Khattak, Jason Gibson, and Charles Noren. My research focused on learning physics-structured dynamics models for skid-steer mobile robots, with the longer-term goal of creating a cross-embodiment dynamics model. I have also interned at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for two summers, during which I did off-road driving research and created a machine learning prediction tool for Mars 2020 mission operations. Previously, I interned at MIT Lincoln Laboratory in the Advanced Sensors and Techniques Group in learning for signal and image processing.

In my undergraduate studies at Tufts University in Medford, MA, I had many incredible mentors, including my research advisors Professor Mai Vu and Professor Mike Levin.