Yash Turkar

Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo

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I’m an autonomy intern at Skydio and a Ph.D. student at the University at Buffalo, where I work with Dr. Karthik Dantu in the DRONES Lab. My research centers on utility-aware robot perception: understanding how the quality of visual data shapes downstream performance, and how robots can act to acquire more informative measurements.

I’m particularly interested in the perception-action loop for field robots operating in challenging environments, with an emphasis on active sensing, low-light vision, and robust visual navigation under real-world sensing constraints.

Alongside research, I have taught and redesigned CSE 4/568 Robotics Algorithms at Buffalo and reviewed for ICRA, IROS, and RA-L.

Selected Publications

  1. Lightning: Adaptive Illumination Control for Robot Perception
    Yash Turkar, Shekoufeh Sadeghi, and Karthik Dantu
    arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15900, 2026
    (Under Submission/Review)
    arXiv Website
  2. QAL: A Loss for Recall–Precision Balance in 3D Reconstruction
    Pranay Meshram, Yash Turkar, Kartikeya Singh, Praveen Raj Masilamani, Charuvahan Adhivarahan, and Karthik Dantu
    In IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV), 2026
    To appear. Preprint at arXiv:2511.17824
    arXiv Website
  3. Learning Visual Information Utility with PIXER
    Yash Turkar, Timothy Chase Jr, Christo Aluckal, and Karthik Dantu
    In 23rd Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV), 2026
    Accepted. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.13151
    arXiv Website
  4. Empir3D: A Framework for Multi-Dimensional Point Cloud Assessment
    Yash Turkar, Pranay Meshram, Christo Aluckal, Charuvahan Adhivarahan, and Karthik Dantu
    In 23rd Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV), 2026
    Accepted. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03660
    arXiv Website
  5. Active Illumination Control in Low-Light Environments
    Yash Turkar, Youngjin Kim, and Karthik Dantu
    In International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) 2025, Santa Fe, NM, USA, 2025
    Preprint arXiv:2506.06394
    arXiv Website
  6. Autonomous Culvert Inspection on the Erie Canal using Legged Robots
    Kartikeya Singh, Yash Turkar, Youngjin Kim, Matthew Lengel, and Karthik Dantu
    In Workshop on Field Robotics, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025, 2025
    Selected for Spotlight Talk
    Website
  7. VRF: Vehicle Road-Side Point Cloud Fusion
    Kaleem Nawaz Khan, Ali Khalid, Yash Turkar, Karthik Dantu, and Fawad Ahmad
    In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), 2024
    PDF
  8. Kinematics-only Differential Flatness Based Trajectory Tracking for Autonomous Racing
    Yashom Dighe, Youngjin Kim, Smit Rajguru, Yash Turkar, Tarunraj Singh, and Karthik Dantu
    In 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023