Too Long; Didn’t Read
I help robots learn.
Short Bio
I am a first-year robotics Ph.D. student supervised by Prof. Subramanian Ramamoorthy at the Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy, University of Edinburgh. In 2025, I received my integrated master’s and bachelor’s (M.Eng. and B.A.) degrees in Engineering from Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. I have industrial experience in developing whole-body motion planning for assistive home robots at Dyson. I also worked on open-source domestic service robotics for RoboCup@Home.
Short Bio (third person)
(Useful for talks and papers)
Heramb Modugula is a first-year robotics Ph.D. student supervised by Prof. Subramanian Ramamoorthy at the Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy, University of Edinburgh. In 2025, he received my integrated master’s and bachelor’s (M.Eng. and B.A.) degrees in Engineering from Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. He has industrial experience in developing whole-body motion planning for assistive home robots at Dyson. He also worked on open-source domestic service robotics for RoboCup@Home.
Long version
(If you need a detailed explanation, with links)
I am a first-year robotics Ph.D. student supervised by Prof. Subramanian Ramamoorthy at the Centre for AI in Assistive Autonomy, recently established at the School of Informatics, University of Edinburgh. My research focuses on benchmarking and developing more robust and adaptive learning methods for robot manipulation in human-assistive settings. I also contribute to the centre’s modular kitchen research platform with multiple static and mobile manipulators.
I pursued my integrated master’s and bachelor’s (M.Eng. and B.A.) degrees in Engineering at Queens’ College, University of Cambridge. I gained an in-depth understanding across the breadth of engineering. My master’s dissertation at the Bio-Inspired Robotics Labaratory focused on enabling robot agents to understand multimodal contextual information and adapt to social cues using the novel COntextual INference (COIN) model of sensorimotor learning, originally developed for humans. I was supervised by Prof. Fumiya Iida (now at the University of Tokyo) and Prof. Arsen Abdulali (then a post-doc and now a professor at Queen Mary University, London) and assessed by Prof. Fulvio Forni.
During the summer of 2022, I was the only undergrad intern with the manipulation group within the future robotics group at Dyson. I worked on whole-body motion planning algorithms for assistive home robots. I also developed heuristics for improved motion planning on a custom suite of pick and place tasks.
Before that, I worked on open-source domestic service robotics using Turtlebot-2 for the RoboCup@Home Education Challenge.