Vishnu Sashank Dorbala

I am a final-year CS PhD student at the University of Maryland, College Park, advised by Prof. Dinesh Manocha.

I work at the GAMMA Lab, where I focus on developing generalist robot agents that work consistently in any environment, from day one. My research explores combining pre-trained vision and language models with local scene context and interaction for scalable decision-making. A key interest of mine is in solving the day-one unboxing problem for robot agents.

Prior to my PhD, I earned a master's degree in Robotics at UMD, where I focused on social robot navigation and collaborated with Aniket Bera.

Even before that, I was a Research Fellow for two years at the CVIT, IIIT-Hyderabad, where I was mentored by Prof. C.V. Jawahar and collaborated with Prof. A.H Abdul Hafez.

Outside of research, I enjoy people watching, "writing", occasional bird photography, composing music, and playing Topoi!

Research

Work Experience

• (Summer 2024) Internship at Sony Corp., where I studied the spatial reasoning capabilities of VLMs for embodied exploration and reasoning. I was supervised by Akira Nakamura, and mentored by Marzieh Edraki and Selim Engin.
• (Summer 2023) Internship at Amazon Alexa AI, where I worked on utilizing LLMs for embodied exploration and reasoning. I was supervised by Reza Ghanadhan, and mentored by Robinson Piramuthu and Prasoon Goyal.
• (Summer 2022) Internship at Amazon Alexa AI, where I worked on solving an interesting Embodied AI problem called Vision-and-Language Navigation. I was supervised by Gaurav Sukhatme, and mentored by Robinson Piramuthu, Jesse Thomason and Gunnar Sigurdsson.
• (Summer 2020) Internship at Nokia Bell Labs, where I worked on enabling Visual SLAM on an autonomous indoor Loomo robot.
• (Aug. 2019 - Present) Graduate Student at University of Maryland, College Park
• (Sept. 2017 - April 2019) Research Fellow at CVIT, IIIT-Hyderabad