Seeking PhD research Opportunities | RL & Robot Learning | MS Robotics, NYU

[Ajaykumaar S]

Hi all, 

I'm Ajay, an AI Software Engineer at Capgemini with an MS in Robotics from NYU. I'm looking for PhD opportunities starting Fall 2026 or Spring 2027. 

My RL and robotics work spans both research and personal projects. At NYU's Applied Dynamics Optimization Lab, I built a stereo vision pipeline for bipedal gait analysis and implemented a Soft Actor-Critic controller for bipedal stability in MuJoCo. This work is currently under review to be published in the Journal of Experimental Biology. More recently, I implemented SAC in Gym/ManiSkill to train a robot arm for pick-and-place tasks, reaching 82% accuracy with dense rewards. I also designed an iLQR controller for a quadrotor and fused camera and IMU data using EKF and UKF, achieving 97% pose estimation accuracy. Earlier, I published work on a quadruped robot assistant for the visually impaired at IECON 2021. 

In my current role at Capgemini, I deploy computer vision models, including VLMs and SLMs, on edge hardware (Nvidia, Hailo, Qualcomm) under real-time latency constraints, which has given me a solid grounding in the gap between simulation and real hardware. I've also built agentic AI systems using CrewAI, LangGraph, and MCP for smart home automation and network/connectivity analysis and troubleshooting.

I'm most interested in research around robot learning, perception, locomotion and manipulation. If you have open positions or know of a lab that might be a good fit, I'd love to connect. Thanks for your time. I'm attaching my resume for reference.

Best regards,
Ajay