Samuel Prabhakar Vara

“Robotics software engineer who built and tuned a contact-implicit MPC controller for a full planar pushing manipulation pipeline (“Push Anything”), including a key fix for complementarity violations that eliminated “ghost pushes” and cut time-to-goal from 40s to 25s. Hands-on with ROS/MoveIt on real robot pick-and-place, improving hardware grasp reliability through TF/frame debugging, and uses Drake/URDF for simulation, contact detection, and MPC development.”

“UPenn robotics researcher who architected a real-time autonomous driving decision-making engine, integrating LSTM trajectory prediction with MPC in CARLA and adding conformal prediction to deliver 95% statistical safety guarantees under strict latency constraints. Also built and debugged an autonomous quadrotor stack with ESKF-based 6-DoF tracking and optimized A*/Dijkstra planning to eliminate latency-induced instability, with experience bridging heterogeneous simulation/control systems.”