Purushotham Mani

Founding Member of Techincal Staff @ Foundry Robotics

About

Hello, and welcome to my profile! I’m a fellow roboticist with a focus on Controls, Reinforcement Learning, and Perception. I work towards contributing to General Purpose Robotics and Autonomous Vehicles one day. I derive great satisfaction from solving puzzles and contemplating the evolutionary forces that have shaped our world. This intellectual curiosity drives me to explore the "whys" and "hows" of our surroundings from an evolutionary perspective.

Country

United States

City

San Francisco Bay Area

Industry

Mechanical Or Industrial Engineering

Skill

Embedded Systems, Linux, AMPL, Gurobi, System Identification, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), SimScale, SOLIDWORKS, Ansys Mechanical, Arduino, IMUs, Orientation Estimation, Sensor Fusion, TensorFlow, MATLAB, Simulink, Robot Operating System (ROS), Control Theory, Python (Programming Language), Engineering

Experience

Founding Member of Techincal Staff

Foundry Robotics

2026-3 - Present · 7 mos

San Francisco Bay Area

Building the everything factory

Graduate Student Researcher

Stanford University

2026-1 - 2026-5 · 5 mos

Stanford, CA

Multi-Robot Systems Lab | Advisor: Prof. Mac Schwager - Working on DroneVLA & Visual Odometry PhD Mentors: John Tucker & JunEn Low

Graduate Teaching Assistant

Stanford University

2025-9 - 2026-1 · 5 mos

Stanford, California, United States

Teaching Assistant for CS 237A/EE 260A/AA 274A/ME 274A: Principles of Robot Autonomy I

Robotic Software Engineer

Symbotic

2025-6 - 2025-9 · 4 mos

Wilmington, MA

- State Estimation & Control Stack on a bare-metal embedded target for deterministic performance at high control frequencies

Teaching Assistant

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

2023-12 - 2024-4 · 5 mos

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Teaching Assistant for ME312: Operations Modeling & Analysis

Department Academic Mentor

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

2023-6 - 2024-4 · 11 mos

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Mentored 20 sophomores; helping them navigate courses, projects, internships and social life in the institute

Undergraduate Student Researcher

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

2022-2 - 2024-4 · 2 yrs 3 mos

Mumbai

Intelligent Dynamical Ubiquitous Systems Lab | Advisor: Prof. Vivek Sangwan - Worked on Underactuated systems for controlled impulse transfer

Undergraduate Student Researcher

Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay

2023-1 - 2023-11 · 11 mos

Mumbai

Advisor: Prof. Avinash Bhardwaj 𝗗𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗗𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗢𝗽𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 (Charging Station Locations, Feasible Path, Multi-Agent Scheduling)

Research Intern

Lakehead University

2023-5 - 2023-8 · 4 mos

Ontario, Canada

• Vision-based autonomous navigation of a quadrotor UAV in GPS-denied environments • Stabilizing an inverted pendulum on a quadrotor UAV

Education

Stanford University

Aerospace, Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering

2024-9 - 2026-6 · 1 yr 10 mos

Coursework: Winter '26 AA 290: Working on DroneVLA with John Tucker and Prof. Mac Schwager AA 200: Applied Aerodynamics AA 204: Spacecraft Electric Propulsion Autumn '25 CS 149: Parallel Computing CME 295: Transformers & Large-Language Models AA 210A : Fundamentals of Compressible Flow AA290: Learned Visual Odometry Spring'25 CS 231N: Deep Learning for Computer Vision AA 203: Optimal and Learning-Based Control AA 276: Safety-Critical Autonomy Winter'25 EE 364a: Convex Optimization AA 212: Advanced Feedback Control CS 237B: Principles of Robot Autonomy II Autumn '24 CS 238: Decision Making under Uncertainty CS 237A: Principles of Robot Autonomy I EE 227: Robot Perception