About Me

I am a Ph.D candidate in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Southern California and a Terminal Graduate Ph.D student of New Faculty in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Stanford University where I am advised by Prof. Somil Bansal as a part of the Safe and Intelligent Autonomy Lab. I received my M.S. in Robotics from the Robotics Department, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and Bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering from VIT University, Vellore, India.

I am currently a Research Intern at NVIDIA's Autonomous Vehicle Group where my work focuses on enhancing the safety evaluation of motion planning algorithms for autonomous vehicles.

Research Interests: Safety of Autonomous Systems and Learning-enabled Components, Control and Planning for Safety-Critical Robots.

Note: I am actively looking for Full Time Positions for 2026 focusing on safety in the autonomous systems and robotics industry. Please feel free to reach out if you are aware of such opportunities! My expected graduation date is December 2025.

E-mail: kaustavc [at] stanford.edu

News & Updates

[May 2025] Presented our SPARQ work at ICRA 2025 in Atlanta! Great experience sharing our research on safety-aware perception failure detection.
[January 2025] SPARQ paper has been accepted at ICRA 2025! Looking forward to presenting our work on safety-aware perception failure detection in Atlanta.
[December 2024] Successfully passed my PhD qualifying exam! I am now officially a PhD candidate.
[October 2024] New paper on Enhancing Safety and Robustness of Vision-Based Controllers is out on arXiv.
[September 2024] Our paper on safeguarding AVs from perception failures is on arXiv.
[August 2024] Our paper has been accepted to IEEE Transactions on Robotics!
[May 2024] Had an amazing time at ICRA 2024 in Yokohama, Japan!
[April 2024] Looking forward to attend the 43rd Southern California Control Workshop at UC Los Angeles on April 19th!
[December 2023] Our paper on synthesizing various safety and liveness filters using Hamilton-Jacobi reachability analysis is out on arXiv!
[September 2023] New paper on detecting and mitigating system-level anomalies of vision-based controllers is out on arXiv!
[March 2022] Our paper on finding failure cases for vision-based controller using reachability analysis has been accepted to RA-L and will be presented at IROS 2023, Detroit!
[August 2022] I will be the teaching assistant for EE 482: Linear Control System for Fall 2022 at USC.
[June 2022] Our paper on obstacle aided path planning has been accepted in RA-L and will be presented at IROS 2022. Thanks to all my collaborators!
[May 2022] I passed my PhD screening exam in the Signal and Image Processing Track!