CV

Curriculum vitae

Contact Information

Name Yash Turkar
Email [email protected]
Phone +1 (609)-302-0396
Website https://yash.turkar.in
LinkedIn yash-turkar-334168ab

Research Interests

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

Research Experience

  • Jan 2022 - Present

    Buffalo, NY

    Graduate Research Assistant
    University at Buffalo
    • Conducted research in perception & autonomy for field robots - VLM-based view planning, active low-light imaging, and mapping-quality metrics. Formulated hypotheses, designed controlled experiments and ablations, built reproducible evaluation pipelines, and validated results across simulation and field deployments.
  • Jan 2026 - May 2026

    San Mateo, CA

    Autonomy Intern
    Skydio
    • Developed and deployed learning-based perception algorithms for distribution pole detection and localization as part of the inspection and mapping team.
  • May 2023 - Aug 2023

    Houston, TX

    Intern - Autonomous Robotics
    SLB
    • Built a sensing-modality evaluation framework (LiDAR/RGB/thermal), validated on quadrupeds, yielding data-driven sensor/configuration recommendations for autonomous inspection.
  • May 2022 - Aug 2022

    Houston, TX

    Intern - Autonomous Robotics
    SLB
    • Benchmarked dense SLAM with mixed sim/field datasets for onshore inspection, improving robustness and frequency of inspection, deployed on quadruped robots in a proof-of-concept.

Teaching Experience

  • Aug 2024 - Dec 2024

    Instructor/Teaching Fellow, CSE 4/568 Robotics Algorithms
    • Completely re-designed syllabus; created ROS-based programming assignments for 50+ students.
    • Taught first-principles autonomy. Material included kinematics, probabilistic algorithms for localization and mapping, planning, and navigation.
  • Jan 2022 - Dec 2023

    Teaching Assistant, CSE 4/568 Robotics Algorithms
    • Led weekly discussions; held office hours; graded exams.
    • Designed auto-graded assignments; maintained Piazza and course GitHub.

Education

  • 2022 - Present

    PhD
    University at Buffalo
    Computer Science
  • 2021 - 2023

    Master's
    University at Buffalo
    Computer Science
  • 2016 - 2020

    Bachelor's
    University of Mumbai
    Computer Engineering

Selected Publications

  • 2025
    Active Illumination Control in Low-Light Environments
    Y. Turkar, Y. Kim, and K. Dantu
    International Symposium on Experimental Robotics (ISER) 2025, Santa Fe, NM, USA. Preprint arxiv:2506.06394.
  • 2026
    QAL: A Loss for Recall-Precision Balance in 3D Reconstruction
    P. Meshram, Y. Turkar, K. Singh, P. R. Masilamani, C. Adhivarahan, and K. Dantu
    IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV) 2026. Preprint at arXiv:2511.17824, 2026.
  • 2026
    Learning Visual Information Utility with PIXER
    Y. Turkar, T. Chase Jr, C. Aluckal, and K. Dantu
    23rd Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV), 2026. Preprint at arXiv:2409.13151, 2026.
  • 2026
    Generating Synthetic Illumination Variation from Sparse Co-Located Captures
    Y. Turkar and K. Dantu
    3rd Workshop on Synthetic Data for Computer Vision (SynData4CV), CVPR, 2026
  • 2026
    Empir3D: A Framework for Multi-Dimensional Point Cloud Assessment
    Y. Turkar, P. Meshram, C. Aluckal, C. Adhivarahan, and K. Dantu
    23rd Conference on Robots and Vision (CRV), 2026. arXiv preprint arXiv:2306.03660, 2026.
  • 2026
    Lightning: Adaptive Illumination Control for Robot Perception
    Y. Turkar, S. Sadeghi, and K. Dantu
    (Under Review), 2026.
  • 2025
    TERA: A Simulation Environment for Terrain Excavation Robot Autonomy
    C. Aluckal, R. V. K. Lal, S. Courtney, Y. Turkar, Y. Dighe, Y. Kim, J. Gemerek, and K. Dantu
    2025 IEEE International Conference on Simulation, Modeling, and Programming for Autonomous Robots (SIMPAR), IEEE, 2025, pp. 1-6.
  • 2024
    VRF: Vehicle Road-Side Point Cloud Fusion
    K. N. Khan, A. Khalid, Y. Turkar, K. Dantu, and F. Ahmad
    Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications and Services (MobiSys), 2024, pp. 547-560.
  • 2023
    Kinematics-Only Differential Flatness Based Trajectory Tracking for Autonomous Racing
    Y. Dighe, Y. Kim, S. Rajguru, Y. Turkar, T. Singh, and K. Dantu
    2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), IEEE, 2023, pp. 1629-1636.

Projects

  • Adaptive Illumination Control for Robot Perception
    • Developed Lightning, a closed-loop illumination-control framework for robot perception that improves visual SLAM robustness in low-light and high-dynamic-range scenes.
    • Introduced a Co-Located Illumination Decomposition (CLID) relighting model to separate ambient illumination from light contribution and synthesize physically consistent multi-intensity training data.
    • Formulated an offline Optimal Intensity Schedule and distilled it into a real-time imitation-learned controller that selects discrete onboard light levels while balancing SLAM utility, power consumption, and temporal smoothness.
  • NightHawk: Active Illumination Control [ISER 25']
    • Active illumination and exposure control using Bayesian optimization and a feature-utility metric to boost feature detection and matching in low light.
    • Implemented the event-triggered optimization loop, camera/light control, and Mfeat; field tests showed 47-197% gains in tracking/matching.
    • Designed a ROS2-controlled 50W LED flood light for active illumination in low-light environments.
  • Language-in-the-loop Culvert Inspection on the Erie Canal
    • Language-in-the-loop inspection pairing a VLM with viewpoint planning on a legged robot to inspect a 66m culvert and capture targeted close-ups.
    • Integrated VLM prompting, stereo-scale recovery, and a culvert-aware planner on Spot; designed the expert study showing ROI agreement over 80%.
    • Designed a low-cost 3D printed pan-tilt camera gimbal controllable using ROS2.
  • PIXER: Learning Visual Information Utility
    • Lightweight model that predicts pixel-wise “featureness” and uncertainty to filter keypoints and improve visual odometry with fewer features.
    • Designed the Bayesian learning pipeline and evaluation, reducing VO RMSE by ~31% with ~49% fewer features on Davis/KITTI-style data.
  • Empir3D: Multi-Dimensional Point Cloud Quality Assessment
    • Four-axis point-cloud quality framework (resolution, accuracy, coverage, artifacts) addressing limits of single-distance measures for 3D tasks.
    • Implemented metrics and analysis tools and ran SLAM/completion case studies, showing complementary value beyond Chamfer/Hausdorff.
  • EARTH: Excavation Autonomy with Resilient Traversability and Handling
    • Autonomy framework for excavators integrating perception, planning, and hydraulic control, supported by the TERA simulator.
    • Led perception and simulation components and integrated safe control/state-estimation modules.
  • Hex-Wife: Hex-rotor UAV Platform
    • Low-cost hex-rotor UAV built for AUVSI SUAS 2019, used for autonomous flight tests and payload experiments in mapping/inspection.
    • Airframe and avionics design; flight-stack and state-estimation integration; controller tuning; field validation.

Skills

Programming Languages: Python (OpenCV, Open3D, NumPy, Pandas, Torch, TensorFlow, PyTorch3D), CUDA, Java, SQL, C, C++, JAX
Robotics & Simulation: ROS, ROS2, Gazebo, NVIDIA Omniverse Isaac, Gibson-Env, Unity, PX4
Tools & Frameworks: MATLAB, CAD, LaTeX, Linux, Git, Docker, LXC, Rerun

Reviewing

  • IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, ICRA (2024-Present)
  • IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS (2025-Present)
  • IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, RA-L (2024-Present)

Honors & Awards

  • 2022
    CSE Graduate Leadership Award
    University at Buffalo
  • 2019
    Just Joe Sportsmanship Award
    AUVSI SUAS

Invited Talks

Autonomous Robotics for Archaeology: IMPERO Summer School, Grosseto, Italy (Remote), June 2024
Excavation Autonomy with Resilient Traversability and Handling: MOOG-UB Workshop, University at Buffalo, NY, December 2024