Prabhakar is a PhD student in the Department of Engineering at King's College London, under the supervision of Dr. Matthew Howard.
In 2013 he received a First Class Honours Bachelors in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from PES University, Bangalore, India. He holds a First Class Distinction MSc. Degree from King’s College London as well. He has professional experience with organisations like Tesco and Monsanto.
Research Project
Robotic Singulation of Tangled Plants
The development of collaborative robotics are seen as key to the factory of the future and the adoption of industry 4.0 in manufacturing engineering. This research aims to investigate the use of collaborative robotics in the production of horticultural crops such as herbs by understanding and imitating the fine dexterous manipulation strategies humans use with their own hand, and modelling these through advanced statistical learning techniques. Experimental tests will be conducted to gather data on hand control strategies and testing will include measurements of the extent to which these can be transferred for successful automation of herb singulation in a production line environment.
Research Interests
- Reinforcement Learning
- Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Manipulation of Deformable Objects
- Singulation Strategies for Entanglement prone Objects
Funding Awards
- The Professor Sir Richard Trainor PhD Scholarship
- Vitacress Salads Ltd.
Research Publications
- Robotic Untangling of Herbs and Salads with Parallel Grippers
2020 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
- A library for constraint consistent learning
2020 Advanced Robotics Journal (Issue 13: Special Issue on Robot Learning)
- Robotic Untangling of Herbs with Parallel Grippers
2020 EPSRC UK-Robotics and Autonomous Systems Conference (UK RAS)
- Learning task constraints in operational space formulation
2017 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Media Publications
Contact
Department of Engineering
Strand Campus
King's College London, Strand,
London, WC2R 2LS
United Kingdom
Email: ray[dot]prabhakar@kcl.ac.uk