hi, i'm visvam rajesh
a carnegie mellon university student passionate about robotics, autonomous systems, and software development.
what i'm doing now
Driverless Path-Planning Developer
Carnegie Mellon Racing
Building SLAM and trajectory algorithms for an all-electric race-car.
Researcher, Motion Planning Lead
Foam Robotics Lab
Developing dexterous surgical assistant robots for manipulating tissue retractors. Mapping natural-language surgeon commands to safe, constraint-aware trajectories.
Software Engineer
ScottyLabs
Working on cmucourses.com website backend, developing student schedule creation heuristic.
latest research
my recent publication in pathfinding algorithms
An Extension of Pathfinding Algorithms for Randomly Determined Speeds
Visvam Rajesh, Chase Q. Wu
Abstract
Pathfinding is the search of an optimal path between two points on a graph. This paper investigates the performance of pathfinding algorithms in 3D voxel environments, focusing on optimizing paths for both time and distance. Utilizing computer simulations in Unreal Engine 5, four algorithms—A*, Dijkstra’s algorithm, Dijkstra’s algorithm with speed consideration, and a novel adaptation referred to as Time*—are tested across various environment sizes. Results indicate that while Time* exhibits a longer execution time than A*, it significantly outperforms all other algorithms in traversal time optimization. Despite slightly longer path lengths, Time* can compute more efficient paths. Statistical analysis of the results suggests consistent performance of Time* across trials. Implications highlight the significance of speed-based pathfinding algorithms in practical applications and suggest further research into optimizing algorithms for variable speed environments.
Citation
V. Rajesh and C. Q. Wu, "An Extension of Pathfinding Algorithms for Randomly Determined Speeds," 2024 IEEE International Performance, Computing, and Communications Conference (IPCCC), 2024.
featured projects
here are some of my recent projects spanning robotics, machine learning, and software development.
Poke-ViT
A Vision Transformer model trained to classify Pokémon images.
Pathfinding Research
A research paper regarding pathfinding algorithms in 3D voxel space, done with Dr. Wu from NJIT.