Server-Shenanigans
Accidentally becoming a sysadmin and lived to tell the tale
Saksham Sharma
I teach metal and sand how to understand space
I'm Saksham. Currently I spend my days at CMU's AIRLab watching highly educated metal boxes have existential breakdowns in the mud.
When I’m not acting as a couples counselor for sensors and actuators, I am either swimming, cycling, or making some animations!
Before adopting my current brand of chaos at CMU, I spent my time sharing a sandbox with some delightfully brilliant (and unhinged) humans at Skild.ai and ARTPARK (IISc)
Recent News
- June 2026 TOLD paper accepted for IROS 2026, see you down the street for conference!
- Jan 2026 Joined MS in Robotics at CMU, working at AIRLab!
- Sep 2025 Short stint Robotics Engineer at Skild.ai
- Sep 2025 Paper Reward-based Autonomous Online Learning Framework for Resilient Cooperative Target Monitoring accepted at TMLR 2025!
- Jul 2023 Joined the AI & Robotics Lab at IISc Bangalore as Research Assistant under Prof. Suresh Sundaramm.
- Jun 2023 Graduated from RVCE with a B.E. in ECE. Awarded Best Outgoing Student of ECE 2023 batch.
Publications
multi-robot
Topological Online Learning for Displacement (TOLD) based Formation Control
IROS 2026
Instead of giving each robot a smarter local controller, TOLD adapts who each robot listens to — rewiring edge weights online via gradient descent to minimize formation error. No training, no centralized coordinator, stackable on any existing method.
navigation
IRisPath: Enhancing Off-Road Navigation with Robust IR-RGB Fusion for Improved Day and Night Traversability
ArXiv
IRisPath fuses infrared and RGB camera streams to build robust costmaps for off-road robot navigation that remain reliable in both daylight and nighttime conditions without specialized calibration targets.
multi-robot
Reward-based Autonomous Online Learning Framework for Resilient Cooperative Target Monitoring using a Swarm of Robots
TMLR 2025 — 2025
A consensus-based decentralised cooperative monitoring system for agile targets using swarm robots under uncertainty accepted at Transactions on Machine Learning Research.
systems
Meow: Memory Evaluation through Optimized Workloads
IEEE INDICON 2023 — 2023
An automated litmus-test synthesis tool that generates distinguishing tests between two versions of a memory model, used for formal verification of ARM's memory architecture.
multi-robot
Multi Robot Path Planning Using Priority Based Algorithm
IEEE Connect 2022 — 2022
A priority-based decentralised algorithm for multi-robot path planning that resolves inter-agent conflicts without central coordination, demonstrated on a physical multi-robot testbed.
Pet Projects
manipulation
Machine Tending Robot
UR5-based robot configured with Basler camera and ROS. Uses Fourier-Mellin transform for 90ms single-reference object detection for precision pick-and-place tasks.
navigation
Autonomous Navigation Stack — Wipro-IISc SUV
Autonomous navigation stack for SUV-scale vehicle — LiDAR-camera fusion costmap, DWA + TEB planners, LIOSAM/LOAM SLAM, and drive-by-wire control via CAN bus.
Thoughts? Rants? Documentation?
DWA - Helping robots move in real world
How to get your robots to carry out their autonomous motion in real life
Multi Robot Planning
Indulging in the beautiful field called multi-robot path planning using Private Obstacle Path Planning algorithm
Creating my own world - Ray Tracing
$ g++ main.cc -lpthread && ./a.out >>splashOfLife
SFX / Animation
Another hobby I dabble with — animation, SFX, and a little bit of design.
If the content deserves a dub you shall leave a sub.
The Master created humans first as The Lowest Type, most easily formed. Gradually, he replaced them by robots, the next higher step, and finally he created me, to take the place of the last humans.