Mukil Saravanan
- Roboticist
Biography
Updated in June 2026
Mukil Saravanan is an MSc Robotics (Honours) student at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). His research interest lies in the intersection of robotics, machine learning and control with a focus on physical intelligence via structural inductive biases. He is particularly interested in how control policies can leverage physics-informed and geometrical priors to achieve data efficiency and robust generalisation under distributional shifts. He has received multiple academic distinctions, including leaderboard prizes at IEEE ICRA and IROS competitions, the Summer Research Fellowship from the Indian Academy of Sciences (2021), and holds a granted patent. He has also volunteered at major robotics conferences, including IEEE ICRA@40 and IEEE RO-MAN 2025.
In prior, he worked as a graduate researcher in the Robotics Innovations Lab in the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. He earned his bachelor's degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the Government College of Technology, Coimbatore where he chaired the student branch to be honoured for numerous outreach activities through competitions and seminars.
Apart from his academic endeavours, he enjoys photographing landscapes, streets and loves beatboxing, calisthenics and discussing philosophical ideas.
SKILLS
Technical Skills
Soft Skills
Tools
Experience
A short summary of my work experience.
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February 2026 - April 2026
Teaching Assistant
- Assisted in practicum classes of Intelligent Control Systems (RO47021) course handled by Prof Cosimo Della Santina
- Mentored masters' students in implementing Physics-Informed Learning (LNNs), Iterative Learning Control, Gaussian Processes and other learning based controllers using JAX and PyTorch.
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November 2025 - March 2026
Research Student
- Investigated on learning temporally-coherent action chunks using Contrastive Policy Learning from Interactive Corrections. CLIC-Chunks maintained high success rates for various manipulation tasks while revealing a critical scalability limit due to EBM sampler. Supervised by Zhaoting Li and Prof Jens Kober
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March 2025 - June 2026
Honours Research Student
- Jointly researched on whole body control of aerial robot manipulation with Dr. Sihao Sun, under the supervision of Prof. Javier Alonso-Mora. This work investigates developing a task space planning for a 2-DoF aerial manipulator using Non-linear Model Predictive Control (NMPC), integrating the system's coupled contact kinodynamics. Developed a high-fidelity full-body aware contact aerial manipulator in MuJoCo.
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- Researched and developed a state-space model of a high-fidelity system and a control algorithm in association with Hindustan Aeronautics Limited and Indian Institute of Scicence (IISc) under the guidance of Mr. Hitesh Mohan Trivedi and Prof. Abhra Roy Chowdhury
August 2023 - November 2023 (Fall 2023)
Teaching Assistant
- Taught the fundamentals of embedded systems with embedded C programming in laboratory classes of MN 207 (Intelligent Mobile Robots)
- Developed, delivered hands-on lab sessions and realizing the concepts through Firebird V robot
March 2022 - May 2024
Graduate Researcher
- Researched on developing a novel Brain-Robot Interface to navigate audio sources of assistive robots in industry 4.0 scenarios, under the guidance of Prof. Abhra Roy Chowdhury
- Received 2 awards in the prestigious IEEE ICRA and IROS 2022 competitions
- Published a first authored conference paper at ACM Advances In Robotics (AIR) 2023
- Filed an Indian Patent (Application Number: 202341087196)
August 2022 - November 2022 (Fall 2022)
Teaching Assistant
- Assisted in laboratory classes of MN 207 (Intelligent Mobile Robots)
- Taught basis of embedded C programming and realized concepts through Firebird V robot
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GCT IEEE Student Branch,
CoimbatoreSeptember 2021 - November 2022
Student Branch Chair
- Established and chaired the GCT IEEE Student Branch comprising 60+ members to foster a strong research culture in GCT.
- Founded the Robotics Club in GCT which focuses on inter-disciplinary research to envision and create robots that enrich people's lives.
- Conducted a 6-month intra-college AI hackathon with over 100 participants, hosted more than 20 seminar sessions, AI BootCamp, inter-college workshop on 'Wheeled Mobile Robotics' to 60+ undergraduate students in Tamilnadu and presented works on National Technology Day 2022, featured in IEEE Madras Section Newsletter.
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- Awarded the prestigious Indian Academy of Sciences (IAS) Summer Research Fellowship to research under the principal research scientist Dr Rathna G N at Digital Signal Processing lab.
- Focused on feature extraction methods of ECG signals to detect emotions for a trans-radial prosthetic arm. Adopted 4-level wavelet decomposition to extract a total of 18 temporal, spectral and non-linear Heart Rate Variability (HRV) features.
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- Designed a Robot Process Automation (RPA) bot solution to download email attachments and automate data entry into a web form.
- Compared and utilized web scrapping tools such as UiPath and Selenium to automate the workflow.
Education
A brief overview of my educational background..
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GPA: 8.1 (Until Quarter 6)
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Government College of Technology,
CoimbatoreBE in Electronics & Communication Engineering
August 2018 - June 2022
CGPA: 8.85 (First class with Distinction)
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Sri Lathangi Vidhya Mandir Higher Secondary School,
PollachiHigher Secondary School (Grade 12)
June 2016 - April 2018
Percentage: 97.4
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Percentage: 96.4