kavya@robotics: ~/about
kavya@robotics:~$ cat about.txt
Kavya Shankar

I recently graduated with an M.Sc. in Autonomous Systems from Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg (H-BRS), Germany. I completed my thesis on affordance-conditioned robot manipulation from egocentric human video, supervised by Prof. Sebastian Houben and Prof. Hermann Blum.

I am currently a Research Assistant at the University of Bonn (RPL), working on leveraging human demonstration data to deploy skills on real robots. I am also building Guido, a mobile assistance robot for hospital patients.

My interests are in robot learning, 3D perception, and getting modern policies to work on real hardware.

Kavya Shankar
kavya@robotics:~$
kavya@robotics: ~/research/thesis
kavya@robotics:~$ cat thesis.bib
Master's Thesis
FunAkt3D - robot manipulating a drawer using an affordance-conditioned diffusion policy learned from human video.
FunAkt3D: Functional Element Detection and Affordance-Conditioned Manipulation from Human Video
Kavya Shankar · M.Sc. Thesis, H-BRS, 2026
Advisors: Prof. Sebastian Houben, Prof. Hermann Blum

A diffusion-based trajectory policy that learns manipulation from egocentric human videos, conditioned on detected functional elements (handles, knobs, buttons). Achieves 63.5% real-world success on drawer/door tasks on the Hello Robot Stretch - a 36 percentage point improvement over the simulation-pretrained baseline.

kavya@robotics: ~/active
kavya@robotics:~$ jobs -l
Active Builds
Isaac Sim scene with a robot arm manipulating a cabinet - generating and validating manipulation trajectories for a benchmark dataset.
Creating Benchmarks for Robot Manipulation
Kavya Shankar · In progress, 2026 -;

Building a dataset in NVIDIA Isaac Sim to validate robot actions and benchmark manipulation policies - generating and verifying trajectories in simulation to evaluate how well learned actions transfer.

Guido robot platform - top-down view showing Intel NUC, Hokuyo LiDARs, Kelo wheels, and power electronics on an aluminum chassis.
Guido - a hospital assistance robot
Kavya Shankar · In progress, 2026 -;

A mobile robot built to help patients in hospitals - wayfinding, fetching, and a friendly presence. Started in March 2026. ROS 2, with SLAM and Nav2.

kavya@robotics: ~/projects
kavya@robotics:~$ ls -la projects/
Projects
Functional element detection in 3D scans.
Functional Element Detection in 3D Scans
Pre-thesis R&D, SceneFun3D benchmark

Multi-view YOLO + SAM pipeline for lifting 2D functional-element detections into 3D point clouds. Voxel accumulation, DBSCAN clustering, plane segmentation, and SAM2 tracking, with iterative mAP optimisation across several lifting strategies.

Retinal layer segmentation in OCT imaging.
Retinal Layer Segmentation in OCT Imaging
Research mini-project

Integrated the EVA-02 Vision Transformer backbone into an OCT retinal layer segmentation pipeline, replacing the default CNN encoder to improve representation learning on sparse medical-imaging data.

Spare part recommendation system at Vaillant Group.
Spare Part Recommendation System
@ Vaillant Group, industry research

Customer complaints were recorded in an unstructured, free-text format with no standardized fields. Using historical records and resolution notes logged by site engineers, we explored using LLMs to interpret these informal complaints and predict relevant spare parts or likely issues, with the aim of enabling faster diagnosis and resolution.

NLP, Machine Learning, LLMs
Topic investigation for online news classification.
Topic Investigation for Online News Classification
@ Fraunhofer IAIS, research

Performed this research under the stream "Learning for Multilingual Knowledge Transfer". The goal was to leverage the availability of a higher amount of data in high-resource languages to train and improve over lower-resource languages.

NLP, Machine Learning, BERT, Zero-shot Learning, t-SNE, PyTorch, Wandb
Motion control for the KELO 500 mobile robot.
Motion Control for KELO 500 Mobile Robot
Robotics coursework

Inverse-kinematics controller computing wheel torques from a desired platform force. Direct EtherCAT communication via SOEM, with BLAS/LAPACK for the numerical solve, in C.

Engagement Prediction in Robot-Assisted Therapy for Children with ASD
Deep learning project

Knowledge-distillation model trained on OpenFace visual features across therapy sessions to estimate child engagement during robot-assisted autism therapy. Small-data, high-stakes, per-subject generalisation.

kavya@robotics: ~/experience
kavya@robotics:~$ git log --experience/
Experience
Apr 2026 - present
RPL @ University of Bonn, Bonn - Research Assistant. Leveraging human demonstration data for robot learning with diffusion models.
Oct 2024 - Feb 2026
PhenoInspect, Bonn - Student Data Assistant. Annotation, segmentation and QA of agricultural plant imagery for ML training sets; workflows around SAM-assisted labelling.
Apr 2024 - Jul 2024
ubiMaster, Germany - Student, AI Solutions. Time-series forecasting for early human-in-the-loop intervention signals in an EdTech product.
Jan 2023 - Sep 2023
Vaillant Group, Germany - Student, NLP Research. Feature-extraction strategies for a multilingual spare-part recommendation prototype.
Nov 2021 - Dec 2022
Fraunhofer IAIS, Sankt Augustin - Student Research Assistant. News-classification research with a focus on zero-shot transfer and representation analysis.
Sep 2020 - Jan 2021
Covalensedigital, India - Software Developer. Subscription-monetisation solutions for telecom clients across C, Java/J2EE and PL/SQL.
Education
2021 - 2026
M.Sc. Autonomous Systems
Hochschule Bonn-Rhein-Sieg, Germany
2016 - 2020
B.Tech. Computer Science & Engineering
Presidency University, Bangalore, India