Shivani Kamtikar

I am a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). I am a Research Assistant at Distributed Autonomous Systems Laboratory (DASLab) where I work with Prof. Girish Chowdhary. I received my MSCS degree from UIUC in 2022. My master's thesis was on "Visual Servoing for Pose Control of Soft Continuum Arms." Previously, I was a research intern at the University of Notre Dame where I was advised by Prof. Zhiyong Zhang.

My research lies at the intersection of Robotics and Computer Vision. I work on developing learning-based solutions for manipulation and control of soft robots in cluttered environments. This work finds use in many applications such as autonomous harvesting, human assistive devices, medical imaging, underwater exploration and more.

I am the weSTEM Director for the upcoming weSTEM 2025 conference organized by Graduate Society of Women Engineers (GradSWE) at UIUC. I am a strong advocate for women in STEM and enjoy working towards this cause.

Beyond research, I enjoy hiking, travelling, painting, and reading. I also have a big plant collection and am often seen tending to my plants with a nice cup of coffee.

Contact me if you want to discuss any interesting research idea, or collaborate on something!