Shivani Kamtikar

I am a Ph.D. candidate in Computer Science at the University of Illinois Urbana‑Champaign (UIUC). I work in the Distributed Autonomous Systems Laboratory (DASLab) with Prof. Girish Chowdhary. I was an Applied Scientist co-op at Amazon Robotics where I worked with Prof. Taskin Padir and Dr. Josh Migdal. I received my MSCS from UIUC in 2022. My master's thesis was Visual Servoing for Pose Control of Soft Continuum Arms. Previously, I was a research intern at the University of Notre Dame with Prof. Zhiyong Zhang. I got my BTech from Pune University, India.

I’m the Director for GradSWE @ UIUC 2025. Outside research, I enjoy hiking, traveling, painting, reading, and growing a small jungle of houseplants.

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Research

My research lies at the intersection of Robotics, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning. I work on developing learning-based methods for manipulation with soft and hybrid robotic arms, focusing on dexterous control in cluttered and unstructured environments. I also work on tactile‑centric policies for manipulation for vision‑free exploration and object reconstruction for rigid arms and anthromorphic hands. This work finds use in many applications such as autonomous harvesting, human assistive devices, medical imaging, underwater exploration, manufacturing and more!

A deep learning-based visual servoing framework enabling robust 3D positioning of soft continuum arms, achieving sub-2 cm translation error and sub-0.25 rad rotation error in structured settings.

Upcoming work presented at ICRA 2025 on precision harvesting in cluttered environments.

We present a position and orientation controller for a hybrid rigid-soft manipulator arm.

Extending visual servoing to hybrid continuum manipulators in cluttered, unstructured scenes, combining vision and modeling for robust pose control.

Patents