Dhruv Patel

Dhruv Patel

About me

I am an MS Robotics student at the School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Tech. My interests broadly lie at the intersection of Robotics, Computer Vision and Deep Learning. Specifically, I am passionate about Scene Understanding for Robots, aiming to guarantee robust performances in unforeseen scenarios.

One of my recent experiences involved exploring open-source software development as a Google Summer of Code'23 contributor at Ivy (Unify AI), with an aim to optimize for real-world deployment in Robotics applications. Prior to this, I was a Project Associate at the Robotics Research Centre (RRC), IIIT Hyderabad. At RRC, I worked on Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving in Adverse Weather Conditions (affiliated with Queensland University of Technology (QUT) and ZF Group, and spearheaded the IHub Project Mobility on UAV-based Visual Remote Sensing for Civil Infrastructure Safety Assessment.

I spent the summer of 2020 working on Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) for Level-5 Autonomy at Swaayatt Robots. Post this, I transitioned to a Software Engineering role at Amdocs, and alongside, collaborated with the Norwegian Biometrics Laboratory (NTNU, Norway) to conduct research on Image Super-Resolution problem.

I always look forward to interesting collaborations or chats on AI. Feel free to ping me on LinkedIn or through email.

Interests

  • Robotics & Computer Vision
  • Deep Learning
  • AI & Neuroscience

Education

  • MS in Robotics, 2023-2025

    Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech)

  • B.Tech in Electronics & Communication Engg, 2016-2020

    Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology, Surat

Recent

Work Experience

 
 
 
 
 

GSoC Contributor

Google Summer of Code 2023

June 2023 - August 2023

    Multi-backend framework support of GradSLAM in Ivy [WebSite]

    • Google Summer of Code'23 Contributor at Ivy - unify.ai
    • Developed a multi-backend framework support (PyTorch, JAX, NumPy, Tensorflow) for GradSLAM library in Ivy, with an aim to optimize deployment through highly efficient frameworks like JAX.
Keywords: Robotics, Deep Learning, PyTorch, JAX, NumPy, Tensorflow
 
 
 
 
 

Project Associate

Robotics Research Centre(RRC), IIIT Hyderabad

July 2021 – July 2023

    Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving
    Advisors: Prof. Madhava Krishna and Dr. Sourav Garg

    • Collaborated with ZF Friedrichshafen group and Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Robotics on improving scene understanding and exploring object detection/tracking, segmentation for weather-agnostic setting.
    • Proposed GDIP: Gated Differentiable Image Processing (GDIP) for Object-Detection in Adverse Conditions, which establishes a new SOTA for foggy and low-lighting.
    • Researched downstream problems like video object detection/tracking. Specifically leveraging foundation models (Segment Anything Model - SAM) as global feature refinement alongside the local Spatio-temporal feature refinement techniques. Extending these foundation models to leverage different modalities would enable a more robust video understanding.


    DodgeDrone: Vision-based Agile Drone Flight [WebPage]
    Advisors: Prof. Madhava Krishna

    • Devising a high-level control strategy for obstacle avoidance through Imitation Learning in conjunction with Reinforcement Learning.


    UAV-based Visual Remote Sensing for Automated Building Inspection (UVRSABI)
    Advisors: Prof. Madhava Krishna, Dr. Ravi Kiran and Dr. Harikumar Kandath

    • Automated assessment of civil structures with the help of visual remote sensing.
    • Utilized Structure-from-motion, state estimation, odometry etc. in conjunction with classical Computer Vision and Deep Learning-based visual inspection algorithms to robustly estimate critical structural parameters.
    • Developed and released an open-source library (UVRSABI) for the community. More details here.
Keywords: Robotics, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, 3D Reconstruction, UAVs
 
 
 
 
 

Associate Software Engineer

AMDOCS

Aug 2020 – June 2021 Pune
Scrum Master/Team Lead: Shreyas Kulkarni
  • Responsible for B2B production-level full-stack software development.
  • Developed cross-functional telecom software solutions for Comcast's Orion project (USA).
  • Collaborated with global product owners, ensuring end-to-end feature development, integration and validation with testing team.
  • Technical Stack: Java, ReactJS, SQL, Spring Boot, Maven, and Jenkins.
    • Keywords: Java, SQL, ReactJS, Object-oriented Programming, Microservices, Jenkins, Maven, Spring
     
     
     
     
     

    Research Intern

    Swaayatt Robots

    April 2020 – July 2020
    Advisor: Sanjeev Sharma (Founder & CEO - Swaayatt Robots)
  • Improved Visual Odometry and SLAM pipelines for Level-5 Autonomy.
  • Devised a semantic variant of the Iterative Closest Point (ICP) algorithm outperforming vanilla ICP by 97% (matching loss) and 50% (convergence time), respectively, on the Semantic KITTI dataset.
  • Developed a low-level C++ library.
    • REPORT PDF
    Keywords: Robotics, Mathematical Optimization, SLAM, ICP, LiDARs
     
     
     

    Deep Learning Research Intern

    Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute Of Technology, Surat

    May 2019 - July 2019
    Advisor : Dr. Kishor Upla (Assistant Professor, ECED)
  • Implemented state-of-the-art FaceNet paper and validated it on a custom made dataset of 25 students.
    • Keywords: Face Recognition, Deep Learning

    Publications

    GDIP: Gated Differentiable Image Processing for Object-Detection in Adverse Conditions
    Sanket Kalwar*, Dhruv Patel*, Aakash Aanegola, Krishna Reddy Konda, Sourav Garg, K. Madhava Krishna
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2023
    PDF Code Website
    UAV-based Visual Remote Sensing for Automated Building Inspection
    Kushagra Srivastava*, Dhruv Patel*, Aditya Kumar Jha, Mohhit Kumar Jha, Jaskirat Singh Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla, Pradeep Kumar Ramancharla, Harikumar Kandath, K. Madhava Krishna
    Spotlight paper at European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) Workshop 2022
    PDF Code Website Documentation
    SRTGAN: Triplet Loss based Generative Adversarial Network for Real-World Super-Resolution
    Dhruv Patel*, Abhinav Jain*, Simran Bawkar, Manav Khorasiya, Kalpesh Prajapati, Kishor Upla, Kiran Raja, Raghavendra Ramachandra, Christoph Busch.
    7th International Conference on Computer Vision & Image Processing (CVIP) 2022.
    PDF Code Website

    Design of an Autonomous Agricultural Robot for Real-Time Weed Detection using CNN.
    Dhruv Patel*, Meet Gandhi*, Shankaranarayanan H.* and Anand Darji.
    AVES 2021 conference
    PDF Code Website

    Projects

    .js-id-Self
    All Deep Learning Computer Vision SLAM Other

    Turtlebot3 ROS2

    Object following, path planning and navigation algorithms using ROS2 software stack on Turtlebot3 platform

    National Robotics Contest: RoboCon 2018 & 2019

    Developed autonomous navigation for OmniDrive and Quadruped robots

    UAV-based Assessment of Civil Structures

    Automated building inspection using the aerial images captured using UAV.

    Obstacle Avoidance for UAV

    Predicting an obstacle-free patch for high level control commands

    Fytbuddy: A real-time gym fitness trainer

    Developed a web app-based e-trainer using a flask web server and a Deep Learning-based model for posture correction

    Autonomous Agricultural Robot

    Worked on AGRIBOT to solve crop weed classification problem

    RFID System

    Developed an Identification system using RFID reader, LCD display and Atmel AVR microcontroller.

    Image Super-Resolution

    Proposed a triplet loss-based optimization framework for Image Super-Resolution

    Mapping for level-5 Autonomy

    Improved point cloud registration and mapping by incorporating semantic information in the ICP algorithm

    Object Detection in Adverse weather setting

    Proposed Gated Differentiable Image Processing (GDIP), a domain-agnostic architecture for object detection in adverse conditions.

    Implementation of Path Searching/Tracking algorithms

    Implemented path search/track algorithms like Pure Pursuit, Djikstra, A-star etc.

    Featured

  • UVRSABI was selected for spotlight paper presentation at the CVCIE Workshop at ECCV 2022 and would be deployed by the Central Road Research Institute, Govt. of India in Telangana, India.
  • Presented AGRIBOT at the open-source ROS Agriculture community meet. [YouTube]
  • Secured 13th rank in RoboCon 2019, Asia-Pacific Robot Contest, among over 100 universities. [RoboCon2019 YouTube]
  • Secured 12th rank in RoboCon 2018 among over 100 universities. [RoboCon2018 YouTube]
  • Best Working Model - Stirling Engine at the National Science Day Celebrations, Physical Research Laboratory (PRL), India, during 12th grade.