About

Smruti Panigrahi, Ph.D. is an accomplished Robotics & AI/ML Leader & Visionary with over 10 years of research and industry experience. He has expertise in Robotics & Automated Driving, Deep Learning and Reinforcement Learning, Computer Vision, SLAM, Vehicle Dynamics and Controls, Realtime Algorithm Development, Numerical Simulation, and Signal Processing. Smruti has filed/granted 20+ patents in Robotics, AV, AI/ML, AR/VR/MR. Smruti is proficient in programming and simulation using ROS, Gazebo, Autoware, Unity, CARSIM, Python, C, C++, R, Java, Matlab, Simulink, Wolfram Mathematica, Tableau, Hadoop/HiveQL, Spark/Scala. He has a GitHub profile with several projects and a personal website. Currently, Smruti is a Robotics & AI/ML Research Engineer and Ford Robotics Co-Founder at Ford. He co-founded Ford Robotics Research and Advanced Engineering and leads robotics and AI/ML research on mapping, localization, SLAM for indoor and outdoor navigation. He leads a team of senior engineers on robot hardware and software platform design and development for automated end-to-end goods delivery. Smruti is also leading sensing and computing hardware study for real-time robotics and developing embedded control algorithms for intelligent, autonomous, and self-driving vehicles. He is leading production feature development from concept and algorithm development to vehicle testing and ECU implementation, with a revenue impact to Ford in ~O($100mil./yr). Smruti is also supervising and mentoring colleagues and interns on software development on reinforcement learning, computer vision, robotic perception, localization, and planning. Previously, Smruti worked as a Controls & AI/ML Research Engineer at Ford where he developed and implemented onboard real-time vehicle dynamics and model-based embedded algorithms in ECUs. He also developed machine learning, deep learning, and big data analytics models and visualization software for driver behavior estimation, driver identification, and incident detection and localization. Smruti led Ford global mobility experiments on driver behavior and incident reporting. Smruti completed his Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Mechanical Engineering (Nonlinear Dynamics & Chaos) from Michigan State University. He also holds a Master of Science (M.S.) in Applied Mathematics and a Bachelor of Technology (Honors) in Manufacturing Science & Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur. Smruti also