Aditya Sripada

I make robots work at scale — in production, every day, not in a demo.

I lead robotics at Nimble.ai, where I own the control systems behind autonomous warehouse robots that pick, pack, and move real inventory. I joined as the first robotics engineer on the flagship system and have grown through five roles to Lead Robotics Engineer. The problems I am good at are the ones that only appear at scale: reliability across heterogeneous fleets, dynamics that drift, sensing that degrades in the real world, and the long gap between a robot that works once and a robot that works ten million times without anyone babysitting it.

Research is my passion, not my job title

I build robots on my own time because I cannot not do it. That is where TARS3D came from — a 0.25 m, 0.99 kg machine inspired by the robot from Interstellar, with seven actuated degrees of freedom and four telescopic pillars that reconfigure into an eight-spoke rimless wheel so it can both walk and roll. It is the only TARS recreation that genuinely does both.

It started with zero industry funding and ended up as one of two finalists selected from 202 submissions for the Mike Stilman Award at IEEE Humanoids 2025 in Seoul. It was written up by New Atlas, Hackaday, Yanko Design and more than twenty other outlets worldwide, and by Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute. I mention it not because I am an academic — I am not — but because it is the clearest evidence I have of what I will do with a hard problem and no one telling me to solve it.

Credentials

I am an IEEE Senior Member, a grade held by a minority of IEEE members and awarded only for demonstrated professional achievement, and a member of the Forbes Technology Council. I sit on the IEEE Senior Member review panel, judging other engineers’ applications, and I review for IROS, RA-L, ISER, and ARSO. The full picture is on the recognition page.

Before Nimble I earned my MS in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon’s Robotics Institute (GPA 4.08/4.0) with Prof. Hartmut Geyer, working on control for dynamic legged systems including the ATRIAS biped. Before that I led India’s first gold medal at RoboGames 2017 and built a full-sized humanoid from scratch at IIT Hyderabad.

My range runs from mechanical design and power electronics through optimal control to the software that ties it together. If you want the longer story of how I got here, it is on the robots & me page.