Vaibhav Nandkumar Kadam

Research Engineer Controls

Magna International

Biography

Hello! I’m Vaibhav Kadam, currently working as a Research Engineer in Controls at Magna International, where I develop path planning and decision-making modules for L4 autonomous delivery robots, ensuring real-time performance in complex traffic environments.
I recently completed my Master’s in Robotics at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (May 2024), where I specialized in path planning and sensor fusion under the mentorship of Prof. Jing Xiao.
As an Autonomy Systems Co-op at Danfoss Autonomy, I contributed to the off-highway autonomy stack and worked extensively with GNSS systems ranging from low-cost to high-precision, while integrating and validating autonomy modules on drive-by-wire platforms.
Before that, I served as a Senior Robotics Engineer at Peppermint Robots in India (2021–2022), where I led the development of planning & controls for autonomous industrial floor-cleaning and material-movement robots.
Earlier, at IIT Bombay (2018–2021), I developed the Spherical Robot — a compact surveillance robot requiring advanced system modeling and nonlinear control to reduce inherent wobble. This research resulted in multiple granted patents for small-form-factor spherical robot design, which has since been adapted for industry applications. Press release
I am passionate about advancing autonomy through robust planning, controls, and decision-making, and I’m excited to continue contributing to scalable, safe, and reliable autonomous systems.

Interests

Behavior Planning/Decision-Making
Motion Planning
Reinforcement Learning

Education

M. S. in Robotics Engineering, 2024
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
B. E. in Electronics Engineering, 2018
Ramrao Adik Institute of Technology, Mumbai University

Experience

Autonomy Systems Intern

Danfoss Autonomy

May 2023 – May 2024 Minneapolis, USA

Developed decision making architecture for decision making in Danfoss Autonomous Control Library (ACL) ROS2 using behavior trees.
Migrate & Integrate ACL packages from ROS1 to ROS2 adhering V-Model automotive software development.
Leverage simulations & deploy on Syslogic (Nvidia Orin AGX) for off-highway autonomous vehicles.
Effort for systems integration and testing for ACL Packages on Polaris Ranger from vehicle interface to highway level navigation packages.
Currently working on 3D SLAM solution for outdoor and indoor localization in GNSS denied environments.

Research Assistant

Adaptive and Intelligent Robotics Lab, WPI

November 2022 – December 2023 Worcester, USA

Worked on DigSafe robot - Autonomous Cable Detection & Marking Robot funded by ROSE-HUB WPI & Eversource.
Surveying and Marking power cable laid underground is labourous task, my work was focused on developing sensor fusion algorithm.
I was engaged in development of multi-sensor fusion of Vivax Metrotech cable detector sensor to predict trajectory to be followed.
Implemented local planning based on trajectory prediction and tracking given global path generated from the Utility GIS Data. For more check project Digsafe

Senior Robotics Engineer

Peppermint Robots

July 2021 – July 2022 Pune, India

Contribute to planning & controls of industrial floor cleaning & material movement AGV autonomy stack, focused obstacle avoidance local planner using Motion primitives. Address safety edge cases and collision prediction.
Maintain indoor navigation stack for floor cleaning robots (SD45, SD100)
Developed user interface for deployment for floor cleaning robots, used boustrophedon decomposition for coverage path planning given safe and no-go zones.

Project Research Assistant

Indian Institute of Technology Bombay

July 2018 – June 2021 Mumbai, India

Advised by Prof. Leena Vachhani, Prof. Abhishek Gupta.

Worked as Project staff for development of Spherical Robot for project Search and Reconnnaissance Using Spherical Robot.
Designed & Developed small-form factor spherical robot prototype and experimented with Nonlinear control techniques to reduce wobble.
Performed various trials and colloborative feedback with security agencies for product development.
Effort for technology transfer to Industry for robust product development.
Granted 2 Patents for Novel Design of Spherical robot.

Patents

Methods for Scaling Spherical Robot.

Scalable Spherical Robot Patent Granted at Indian Patent office for design methodolgy to scale spherical robot from 20 cm size

Vaibhav Nandkumar Kadam, Kaustubh Sadekar, Animesh Singhal, Leena Vachhani, Abhishek Gupta

Last updated on Mar 16, 2024

Robot System with Upwards Facing Camera

Scalable Spherical Robot Patent Granted at Indian Patent office for a novel design of placing a wide-angle camera inside the spherical robot on wobbly yoke and performing surveillance & SLAM solution.

Kaustubh Sadekar, Vaibhav Nandkumar Kadam, Animesh Singhal, Leena Vachhani, Abhishek Gupta

Last updated on Mar 16, 2024

Earthquake Rescue and Relief Operations Robot.

ERROR (Earthquake Rescue and Relief Operations Robot) is Tensegrity based robot that can maneuver over uneven surface by linear motion of its 6 struts. The 6 struts are interconnected in a tensegrity structure which is icosahedron structure. That makes the overall structure impact resistant.

Vaibhav Nandkumar Kadam, Pramod S. Jadhav, Anay D. Ghatpande, G. H. Saket Seshadri, Divya K. Shah, Dr. Vishwesh A. Vyawahare.

Last updated on Aug 23, 2023

Earthquake Rescue and Relief Operations Robot.

Projects

Digsafe Autonomous Cable Detection & Marking Robot.

Utility companies require conducting surveys to locate the distribution of power cables, a task that can be laborious. Inorder to solve this probelm, we've designed the DigSafe robot, capable of autonomously detecting cables, predicting their trajectory, and marking their locations on the ground. Our contribution involves novel algorithm of multi-sensor fusion and accurately predicting the path of underground power cables. Additionally, we've developed a tracking controller to follow the generated trajectory, validating it against global plan derived from GIS data when available, or autonomously exploring the environment to locate and mark cables as needed.

Saliency Object Detection using Attention blocks in U2Net Architecture

We explore the application of the U2Net-attention framework to enhance this performance of Salient Object Detection (SOD). Specifically, we analyze standard and modified attention blocks in conjunction with various U2Net architectures, such as attention-inside, attention-outside, and a combination of both.

Multi-Agent Path Finding for Robots in Large-Scale Warehouses

We implement Multi-agent Path Finding algorithms like Space-time Astar, Conflict Based Search and variants for warehouse mobile robots to find collision free path to the target position. We provide comparative analysis of the studied algorithms, with increasing environmental complexity and increasing number of agents

Robust Trajectory Tracking for Quadrotor UAVs using Sliding Mode Control

For a generated quintic trajectory we derive a sliding mode control law to track the reference velocity in ROS Gazebo environment.

Valet Parking using Hybrid Astar

Valet Parking of a differential drive, Car-Ackermann Steering and Truck Trailer we implement Hybrid Astar considering holonomic and non-holonomic constraints with trajectory rollouts to park the vehicle between two other vehicles and maneuvering through obstacles.

Search and Reconnassiance using Spherical Robot.

Spherical robot is palm-sized robot with in built Fish-eye camera based perception. We investigate Nonlinear Feedback linearization control and develop a robust and ergonomic spherical robot to control its wobble while manevuering due to its highly nonlinear nature.

Mobile Base with Spherical Robots as wheels

The project investigated the use of spherical robots as wheels. A omnidirectional mobile base was developed each spheros at 120 degrees apart connected via a link. A kinematic model for commanding the velocities of these actuation is developed. Various experiments were performed with feedback from Vicon Motion Capture systems.

Ball balancing Robot

Generally differential drive mobile robots are non holonomic. The motion constraints pose hinderance in manuevering in indoor cluttered environments.The work focuses on holonomic Ball-Balancing Robot (BBR). BBR system is inherently unstable, and can be dynamically stable. BBR does not have any constraint and need to turn in cluttered places.