🤖 Fun bio by Gemini 💃

Anusha Srikanthan: Robotics Researcher & Choreographer of Complex Systems 🤖

Anusha Srikanthan builds "brains" for robots that need to move with precision, safety, and speed. Currently a PhD Candidate at UPenn's GRASP Lab (advised by Nikolai Matni and Vijay Kumar), her research on Control Decompositions and Impact-Aware Safety ensures that autonomous systems can navigate cluttered, GPS-denied environments without missing a beat.

But long before she was optimizing Augmented Lagrangians, Anusha was optimizing stage formations. At NIT Trichy, she spent four years on the competitive dance circuit, traveling across India to go head-to-head with the country's top collegiate teams. Under her leadership as President of the Dance Troupe in her final year, she didn't just perform—she managed the synergy between two distinct worlds: the rigorous, geometric tradition of Indian Classical Dance and the high-energy, fluid dynamics of Western Dance.

Her teams didn't just compete; they won. That same competitive edge and ability to manage multi-modal "teams" now drives her work in robotics, where she decouples global feasibility from local safety to ensure robots never get "stuck"—on stage or in a cluttered room.

Watch the "Human Hardware" in action across the years:

🏆 The Winning Streak: Witness the competitive energy from her NIT Trichy days:

• Performance 1
• Performance 2
• Performance 3

🌸 The Classical Root: Her Bharatanatyam foundation in "Catch the Dance Bug"

The Anusha Equation:

• By Day: Solving for recursive feasibility and asymptotic stability in 7-DOF manipulators.
• By Night: Analyzing the "zero dynamics" of a perfectly executed Thillana.
• The Goal: Bridging the gap between the expressive fluidity of human motion and the formal guarantees of robotic control.

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