Karun Varghese

About

Robotics engineer/team lead who built an autonomous lunar rover for the NASA Lunabotics challenge, owning electrical systems, comms (UART/WiFi), and autonomy using RealSense + custom YOLO on a Jetson Orin Nano. Also has extensive ROS 2 experience, including creating a ROS2+Gazebo environment with ros2_control custom controllers for a large-scale additive manufacturing printer and research/thesis work in multi-robot coordination and robustness.

Key Strengths

• Led autonomous lunar rover project (NASA Lunabotics) as team lead
• End-to-end robotics architecture ownership (hardware selection + software architecture + implementation)
• Deployed custom YOLO perception on Jetson with RealSense for obstacle/crater detection
• Deep ROS 2 experience across real robot and simulation (Gazebo, ros2_control, RViz2, MoveIt2)
• Diagnosed sim-to-real issues by inspecting ROS topics/telemetry and tracing latency bottlenecks
• Improved real-time behavior by switching to an ultra-low-latency ROS 2 video streaming solution
• Multi-robot coordination work (collision avoidance, handling robot failure via replacement robot)
• Built custom ROS 2 + Gazebo environment and controllers for large-scale additive manufacturing printer

Experience

Education

Awards

• Dean’s List Scholar (All Semesters) - University of Maine
• CUGR Fellowship funded by the NASA-affiliated MSGC Research Experience
• Guinness World Record Holder for the world’s Largest Handwritten Bible
• National Olympiad Topper in Mathematics, Science and English
• Tau Beta Pi - Inductee
• IEEE-HKN - Inductee
• NASA Lunabotics (2025 Finalist)

Skills

Languages

Publications

2 publications

Memberships

• IEEE
• Tau Beta Pi
• IEEE-HKN