Yaadhav Raaj
perception • robotics • engineer

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Raaj here. I've been building computer vision systems for over a decade, for a variety of research, commercial and industrial platforms, with multiple publications and patents in the field. Most recently, i've been building vision systems for humanoid robots at Agility Robotics.

Prior to this, I was doing research at the CMU Robotics Institute working under the esteemed professors Srinivasa Narasimhan and Yaser Sheikh and earned a masters along the way. Before that, I did a stint building vision systems for large scale industrial robots for the Singapore Changi Airport with SpeedCargo. And prior to that, I was building vision systems for underwater robots with Bumblebee.

My resume is linked right here


  Education
image not found Carnegie Mellon University
Masters, Masters of Science in Robotics (MSR)
CMU Robotics Institute
2018 ─ 2021
image not found National University of Singapore
Bachelors, Computer Engineering
Minor in Technopreneurship
2012 ─ 2016

  Career
    Agility Robotics - Portland, OR - 2021
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Digit V4: A Mobile Manipulation Robot
First Perception Engineer to join Agility Robotics in Mid 2021. Lead the development effort in setting up an object detection framework on Digit V4 from scratch. Involved an end to end effort with a great team to build out a logging stack, GPU selection and testing, annotation vendor selection and integration, detection model selection and deployment, 6DOF object detection and tracking. This system now drives the majority of our customer deployments.

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6DOF Object Detection and Tracking
Helped develop the framework to do end to end multi object 6DOF pose detection and tracking. This involved developing a model that was able to regress on contours, keypoints and pose, lifting those objects to 3D, and tracking them with state estimation algorithms. These are done while leveraging the constraints of the end-effectors.
Patent Pending

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Tote Recycling Product
Involved with Agility's Amazon deployments, including our Tote Recycling product workflow. This involved solving multiple customer specific problems, such as tote orientation, tote in hand and nested tote detection.

    CMU Robotics Institute - Pittsburgh, PA - 2018 to 2021
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Triangulation Light Curtains
Worked at the Illumination & Imaging Lab at CMU, primarily contributing towards projects relating to the Triangulation Light Curtain, a type of Adaptive LIDAR. I was involved in a number of projects, including writing a simulator in C++ / CUDA for the imaging and dynamics, integrating a hardware platform including cameras, a 360 LIDAR and this sensor with a full custom calibration suite, and a number of follow up projects published at conferences.

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Exploiting & Refining Depth Distributions with Triangulation Light Curtains
Yaadhav Raaj, Siddharth Ancha, Robert Tamburo, David Held, Srinivasa Narasimhan
CVPR 2021

webpage | abstract | pdf | talk | code

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Active Perception using Light Curtains for Autonomous Driving
Siddharth Ancha, Yaadhav Raaj, Peiyun Hu, Srinivasa Narasimhan, David Held
ECCV 2020

webpage | abstract | pdf | talk | code

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OpenPose
Openpose is a vision software suite, that is capable of detecting full 2D human pose from a single image in real time, irrespective of the number of people in the scene. I was one of the core developers on the project at my time in the Perceptual Computing Lab, writing custom CUDA and OpenCL kernels, writing support for Windows / OSX, and developing a Python API.

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Single-Network Whole-Body Pose Estimation
Gines Hidalgo, Yaadhav Raaj, Haroon Idrees, Donglai Xiang, Hanbyul Joo, Tomas Simon, Yaser Sheikh
ICCV 2019

webpage | abstract | pdf | code

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Efficient Online Multi-Person 2D Pose Tracking with Recurrent Spatio-Temporal Affinity Fields
Yaadhav Raaj, Haroon Idrees, Gines Hidalgo, Yaser Sheikh
CVPR 2019

webpage | abstract | pdf | talk | code

    SpeedCargo - Singapore - 2016 to 2018
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SpeedCargo
I spent two years being the primary vision developer for the SpeedCargo system, building the calibration, cargo measurement, re-detection and large scale pallet scanning system using a custom Gudel industrial robot. Checkout our video

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Vision Driven End-Effector
Developed a custom multi-camera vision system for our custom tool changer, that could perform a high fidelity sub-mm 3D scan of a very large workspace, and perform sub-mm positioning before grasping cargo. We developed a custom Basler TOF-RGB system to be integrated with this hardware, complete with its own CUDA accelerated drivers, along with a unique calibration system leveraging the pose repeatability of the arm, precision milled rods and calibration boards.

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Precise Measurement of Cargo Boxes for Gantry Robot Palletization in Large Scale Workspaces Using Low-Cost RGB-D Sensors
Yaadhav Raaj, Suraj Nair, Alois Knoll
ACCV 2016

abstract | pdf | talk

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Adapting the Search Subspace of a Particle Filter using Geometric Constraints
Nikhil Somani, Yaadhav Raaj, Suraj Nair, Alois Knoll
BMVC Submission 2016

abstract | pdf | talk

    Bumblebee - Singapore - 2014 to 2016
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BBAUV 3.0
Spent time during my undergraduate period working on the BBAUV underwater robot platform, developing object detection and tracking algorithms, by calibrating and fusing data from various sensor sources such as Sonar, Camera, IMU and DVL. We won 2nd place in the AUVSI Robosub competition in San Diego in 2015, being the first team to complete the torpedo board challenge in the history of the competition, thanks to this algorithm.

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3D Object Localization using Forward Looking Sonar (FLS) and Optical Camera via particle filter based calibration and fusion
Yaadhav Raaj, Alex John, Tan Jin
IEEE Oceans 2016 - Patented

abstract | pdf | talk | patent

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BBASV 1.0
Spent time during my undergraduate period working on the BBASV water surface vessel robot platform, developing object detection and tracking algorithms, by calibrating and fusing data from various sensor sources such as Lidar, Cameras and an IMU. We won 2nd place in the AUVSI Robosub competition in Hawaii in 2016. More details on this craft.


  Other

Being a vision person, i quite enjoy photography as a side hobby. And living in the Pacific Northwest, I enjoy imbibing in the great outdoors, with a little hiking, rock climbing, and some mountaineering. I enjoy keeping up to date with all the new technology in our ever evolving field, and most recently built a maze solver conditioned on images with a diffusion based approach. Checkout my github for more projects.


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