Carnegie Mellon University	Pittsburgh, PA
Ph.D. in Robotics, School of Computer Science (GPA 4.0/4.0)	2002 - present

Carnegie Mellon University	Pittsburgh, PA
M.S. in Robotics, School of Computer Science (GPA 4.0/4.0)	2000 - 2002

Thesis : Globally consistent mosaicking for autonomous visual navigation

Indian Institute of Technology	Kharagpur, India
B.Tech.(Hons.) in Electronics and Elec. Commn. (GPA 9.32/10.0)	1996 – 2000

Thesis : Simulation and implementation of a multi-camera stereo system for generating dense disparity maps

Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon

Pittsburgh, PA

Graduate student researcher

Project: UPI program (DARPA)

Sept 2004 - present

• Spatially consistent classification for terrain understanding from ladar
• Scale theory for feature detection in non-uniformly sampled data
• Also worked to develop ancillary technologies, including fast and reliable techniques for laser-camera calibration and high-speed laser rangefinder interfaces

• Scene analysis from laser range data in large urban environments for autonomous object-referenced navigation and reconnaisance missions.
• Robust statistical methods for detection of coherent planar structures in the scene and discrimination between vegetation and clutter.
• Techniques for object detection from sparse laser data..

National Robotics Engineering Consortium	Pittsburgh, PA
Graduate student researcher	Aug 2000-July 2002

Project: Automated Material Transport System (AMTS)

• Map-building and visual odometry to automate guided vehicles for fast and reliable materials transport in complex factory environments.
• Developed a general optimization framework for building maps of large cyclic environments at low computational cost.

Indian Institute of Technology	Kharagpur, India
Undergraduate researcher	1999-2000

• Simulation of a multi-camera vision system and studied its utility in increasing field-of-view and generating dense disparity maps.
• Studied and implemented a variety of communication channel codecs on TMS320 DSP and 8086/8088 microprocessor architectures.

Google Inc.	Mountain View, CA
Summer Intern (Research, OCR teams)	May-July 2007, July-October 2005

• Developed new algorithm for detecting and extracting text from unconstrained images. Also helped develop new metrics for evaluating text detection algorithms.

• Conceived and implemented an efficient technique for VOIP packet encryption (pending patent)
• Designed and implemented a VOIP communication framework with g.723 voice-coding running on a TMS320 processor.

Towards Objective Evaluation of Image Segmentation Algorithms
R. Unnikrishnan, C. Pantofaru, Martial Hebert
Trans. IEEE Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence (PAMI), 29(6), June 2007.

An Infrastructure-free Automated Guided Vehicle based on Computer Vision
A. Kelly, B. Nagy, D. Stager, R. Unnikrishnan
IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine, September 2007.

Conferences (refereed)

Denoising Manifolds and Non-Manifolds from Point Clouds
R. Unnikrishnan, Martial Hebert
Proc. 18th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), September 2007.

Vegetation Detection for Driving in Complex Environments
D. Bradley, R. Unnikrishnan, J. Bagnell
Proc. IEEE Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2007.

Extracting Scale and Illuminant Invariant Regions Through Color
R. Unnikrishnan, Martial Hebert
Proc. 17th British Machine Vision Conference (BMVC), September 2006.

Scale Selection for the Analysis of Point-Sampled Curves
R. Unnikrishnan, J.-F. Lalonde, N.Vandapel, Martial Hebert
Proc.Third Intl. Symposium on 3D Processing, Visualization and Transmission (3DPVT), June 2006

A Measure for Objective Evaluation of Image Segmentation Algorithms
R. Unnikrishnan, C. Pantofaru, Martial Hebert
Proc. IEEE Intl. Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), Workshop on Empirical Evaluation Methods in Computer Vision, June 2005

Scale Selection for Classification of Point-sampled 3-D Surfaces
J. Lalonde, R. Unnikrishnan, N. Vandapel, Martial Hebert
Proc. Fifth Intl. Conf. on 3-D Imaging and Modeling (3DIM), June 2005.

Measures of Similarity
R. Unnikrishnan, Martial Hebert
Proc. Seventh IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), January, 2005, pp. 394-400

Robust Extraction of Multiple Structures from Non-Uniformly Sampled Data
R. Unnikrishnan, M. Hebert
Proc. IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2003, Vol. 2, pp. 1322–1329

Toward Generating Labeled Maps from Color and Range Data for Robot Navigation
C. Pantofaru, R. Unnikrishnan, M. Hebert
Proc. IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2003,  Vol. 2, pp. 1314–1321

Efficient Construction of Globally Consistent Ladar Maps using Pose Network Topology and Nonlinear Programming
A. Kelly, R. Unnikrishnan
Proc. 11th International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR), 2003

A Constrained Optimization Approach to Globally Consistent Mapping
R. Unnikrishnan, A. Kelly
Proc. IEEE/RSJ Intl. Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2002, Vol. 1, October, 2002, pp. 564–569

Mosaicking Large Cyclic Environments for Visual Navigation in Autonomous Vehicles
R. Unnikrishnan, A. Kelly
Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation  (ICRA), 2002, Vol. 4, May, 2002, pp. 4299–4306

Theses and Technical Reports

Fast Extrinsic Calibration of a Laser Rangefinder to a Camera
R. Unnikrishnan, Martial Hebert
Tech. report CMU-RI-TR-05-09, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, July, 2005. Associated with the public domain  Laser-Camera Calibration Toolbox (LCCT)

Globally Consistent Mosaicking for Autonomous Visual Navigation
R. Unnikrishnan
Master’s thesis, tech. report CMU-RI-TR-02-22, Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, September, 2002

• Computer Vision, Advanced Perception, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Non-parametric methods, Probability and Math. Statistics (I & II), Computational Perception and Scene Analysis, Graphical, Statistical and Causal Models, Methods of Optimization.
• Topics in Field Robotics, Sensor-based Robotic Motion Planning, Mathematical Fund. for Robotics, Kinematics, Dynamic Systems and Controls

• Programming Languages: C/C++, Matlab, Visual Basic
  
• Operating Systems: Linux/Unix, Windows
  
• Applications: OpenGL, FLTK, GLUT, Mathematica, Visual Studio, Unix networking
  

• Graduate Fellowship from the School of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon, since Aug. 2000.
• Placed among top 3% of candidates in the 1996 Senior Mathematics Olympiad organized by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE).
• Air-India Scholastic Award and the Chairman Award in 1994, for placing first among candidates from 5 Gulf countries in the Secondary School AISSE examination.
• Certificate of Merit by the French Consulate to the U.A.E. and the Ministry of Education, U.A.E., for proficiency in French.