Aditya Bhatewara · Portfolio
IIT Madras · Mechanical Engineering ’28

Builds things that move, think & fly.

Rovers that navigate alone, drones that land themselves, robots that walk, and the vision systems that let them see.

Aditya Bhatewara
The two efforts that defined the year

Flagships

01

MPC for swarm robots

Research · DiRO Lab, Prof. Anuj Tiwari, IIT Madras · Jan ’26 to Present

A research internship in decentralized multi-drone autonomy under Prof. Anuj Tiwari, taking precision landing and swarm coordination from controller theory to validated flight on real hardware.

  • Helipad detection via Hu Moment Matching: 94% accuracy at 14m in simulation
  • Height-adaptive PID, SMC and DSR controllers with SEARCH, TRACK, LAND states
  • Validated on an X500 drone, landing on an evasive platform moving at 1 m/s from 10m detection height
  • Building consensus-based task allocation to neutralize 10+ ground targets across a 4-drone swarm
X500 drone landing
R.01X500, autonomous landing
Helipad detection
R.02Helipad detection
Swarm simulation
R.03Swarm, in sim
02

Team Anveshak

Mars Rover · CFI, IIT Madras · Software & Electrical Engineer · Apr ’25 to Apr ’26

International Rover Challenge 2026
50+ teams · Worldwide · Feb ’26
1st
Autonomous Mission
3rd
Overall, globally
Caterpillar Autonomy Challenge 2026
40+ teams · National · Jan ’26
2nd
GPS-denied navigation

A year building the autonomy stack that took the rover from CAD model to two international podiums. Simulation first, hardware second, sand last.

  • Built a 1:1 URDF/Xacro model for exact hardware simulation in Isaac Sim and Gazebo before deployment
  • Implemented A* and RRT* on known maps, with Pure Pursuit on Dubins paths for tracking
  • Integrated ZED visual odometry, PX4 GPS and IMU across Orin + Xavier via ROS2, bridged to ESP32 over microROS
  • Configured RTAB-Map SLAM fusing stereo vision and LiDAR: under 1m localization on a 30x30m arena
  • Trained YOLOv8 from scratch on 500 augmented images, detecting cones at 20m in sandy terrain
  • Tuned Pure Pursuit to self-correct lateral deviation: ±0.5m tracking error over 10m traversals
  • Full pipeline: Pure Pursuit to GPS waypoint, then YOLO-guided cone approach within 1.5m
  • At CAC ’26, GPS-denied: Nav2 obstacle avoidance at 85% success, ArUco pose correction under 4°
  • Recruited and mentored 14 freshers over two months into the team
M.01Off-road, full chassis test
M.02Mapping + Nav2, live in RViz
M.03Motor-driver PCB, 3D view
M.04Auger, soil sample extraction
M.05Gripper tip assembly
Rover base station
M.06Base station
From the workshop & the wild

Field notes

Team Anveshak mars rover
FR.01Anveshak rover, IRC ’26
FR.02Rover Heisenberg running autonomously▸
FR.03Isaac Sim, virtual proving ground ▸
Spider quadruped robot
FR.04Quadruped, 12 servos
PCB and electronics work
FR.05Board work
Ancient manuscript digitisation
FR.06Manuscript rig, 23L pages
Saarang professional shows
FR.07Saarang, show night
Warehouse inventory rover
FR.08Warehouse rover, Inter-IIT
Where the hours went

Flight log

Industry · Ikran Aerospace · Apr ’26 to Present

Aerial robotics, defense

  • Defense UAV startup supplying the Indian Army with indigenous armed hexacopters and fixed-wing VTOLs
  • IR-RGB fusion on a NextVision Raptor camera, enabling target identification at 1.4km altitude during night ops
  • Supported 3 demo Army encounters with real-time aerial surveillance from a fixed-wing VTOL
  • Autonomous target-lock tracking targets 2km away at 1km altitude
VTOLIR-RGB fusionNight ops
Internship · MyLifeinLines · Feb ’26 to Present

CV + NLP, hand lines

  • End-to-end CV and NLP pipeline for real-time image scanning and multimodal textual analysis
  • Custom annotation pipeline: 10K+ images, 10+ multi-class labels, 2 weeks
  • SAM3 optimized via LoRA on 10K+ samples: 90%+ accuracy segmenting 4 distinct hand-line classes
SAM3LoRAPyTorch
Freelance · Shrut Deep Research Foundation

Manuscript digitisation

  • Replaced a 4-year, 10-person manual process by automating preprocessing of 23 lakh manuscript images in ~160 hours
  • Tackled staining and uneven lighting in degraded scans with a YOLO + NumPy pipeline to crop, deskew and normalise
23L imagesYOLODeployed
Built, broken, rebuilt

Build log

Inter-IIT Tech Meet 14.0 · Eternal · Oct to Dec ’25

Warehouse rover

  • 15-member interdisciplinary team designing an autonomous rover for real-time inventory scanning
  • Fused RPLidar, encoders and IMU via Kalman filter on ROS2 Jazzy Nav2: ±11cm accuracy on a mecanum rover
  • Z-axis camera mount with 1.5m vertical range: full rack QR scans, ~10 items in ~2.5 min
  • RPi 5 with dual MikroTik units: ~10ms latency to the base station
ROS2 Jazzy Kalman Mecanum
Spider quadruped robot
ME2400 · Prof. Sushanta Panigrahi · Apr ’24 to Present

Spider quadruped

  • Full mechanical assembly in Fusion 360, 9 structural components 3D printed in PLA
  • Custom gait sequences for 12 SG90 servos across 4 legs, 3 DOF each, on an Arduino Nano
  • Custom power distribution PCB regulating a 7.4V Li-ion source to 5V and 3.3V rails for the ESP32 and Nano
Fusion 360IK gaitCustom PCB
What the projects above were built with

Toolkit

Robotics middleware

ROS2microROSMAVROSNav2

Simulation

Isaac SimGazeboURDF / Xacro

Vision & ML

YOLOv8OpenCVPyTorchTensorFlowSAM3 + LoRA

SLAM & estimation

RTAB-MapKalman filtersVisual odometryArUco

Flight stacks

PX4Hu momentsPID / SMC / DSR

Embedded & compute

ESP32ArduinoRPi 5Orin / XavierAltium

Mechanical

Fusion 3603D printingEngineering drawing

Languages & tools

PythonC++CGitLinux
Numbers that left the spreadsheet

Proof of work

80K+
footfall across Saarang professional shows
4,000+
lives reached through Uzhavu’s sustainable agriculture work
₹6L+
sponsorship raised across 7+ partner organizations
23L
manuscript images preprocessed and preserved
160hrs
to replace a 4-year, 10-person manual digitisation process
Off the bench

Also runs things

Coordinator · Saarang Pro Shows · Apr ’26 to Present

World Fest

Spearheading Saarang’s international music festival: 9 global artists from a 45+ country pool, a 25-member team, a ₹5.5L production budget and ₹4L backline sponsorship secured, on a fully grant-funded model. Earlier as Deputy Coord: zero-budget shows with embassies and consulates backing 4 international acts.

Co-founder · Shaastra, IITM

Uzhavu

Shaastra’s sustainable-agriculture campaign: ₹6L+ raised with TNCCM, NAF and ScaNXT, 40 pollination-enhancing setups for local farms, and soil-based crop recommendations for 25+ women farmers in Thiruporur.

Mentor · Saathi · Jul ’25 to Jul ’26

Student mentorship

Mentoring 5 first-year ME students through their transition to college, with weekly one-on-ones across the full academic year.

Deputy Coordinator · Oct ’24 to Apr ’25

Cybersecurity Club

20+ binary exploitation challenges (stack overflows, ROP chains, format strings), a restricted-shell CTF cracked in 72 hours, and corrupted JPEG recovery by hand-repairing file structure.

On paper

The record

B.Tech, Mechanical Engg.IIT Madras · CGPA 9.15 · 2028
Class XII (CBSE)Arihant Junior College, Pune · 94.2% · 2024
Class XMaharashtra State Board · 85.6% · 2022
Modern RoboticsControl SystemsSupervised MLManufacturing Tech IKinematics & DynamicsThermodynamicsFluid MechanicsMI & Controls
1891
AIR · JEE Advanced · Top 1%
407
AIR · JEE Main · Top 0.02%

Among 150,000+ candidates in Advanced and 16,00,000+ in Main, with a perfect 100 in Mathematics. The rest of this page is what happened after.

Tennis

Competed at the AITA Nationals, Under-14 in Bombay. 2nd place in U-14 Boys Doubles at the AITA Talent Series (Solapur) and Champion Series (Mumbai).

Music

Electric guitar with the Light Music Rock Band at Freshie Night, in front of 1000+ people.