Mukil Saravanan
- Roboticist
Bio
Mukil Saravanan is a MSc Robotics (Honours) student at the Delft University of Technology (TU Delft). His research interest lies in the intersection of robotics, reinforcement learning and control. He is particularly interested in developing general-purpose algorithms that enable autonomous systems to acquire complex behaviors, adapt from experience, and operate robustly in uncertain and dynamic environments. He has received multiple academic distinctions, including leaderboard prizes at IEEE ICRA and IROS 2022 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 and calisthenics.
SKILLS
Technical Skills
Soft Skills
Tools
Experience
A short summary of my work experience.
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November 2025 - Present
Research Student
- Investigating on learning temporally-coherent action chunks using Contrastive Policy Learning from Interactive Corrections. It explores how reward signals can be used to improve stability, sample efficiency, and exploration. Supervised by Zhaoting Li and Prof Jens Kober
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March 2025 - Present
Honours Research Student
- Researching on whole body control of a 2-DoF aerial manipulator using Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC), integrating coupled contact and kinodynamic constraints. Supervised by Dr. Sihao Sun and Prof. Javier Alonso-Mora.
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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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Delft University of Technology,
DelftSeptember 2024 - Present
GPA: 8.1 (Until Quarter 5)
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Government College of Technology,
CoimbatoreAugust 2018 - June 2022
CGPA: 8.85 (First class with Distinction)
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Sri Lathangi Vidhya Mandir Higher Secondary School,
PollachiJune 2016 - April 2018
Percentage: 97.4
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Venkitraj Matriculation School,
SultanpetJune 2003 - April 2016
Percentage: 96.4