Ankan Mondal

From designing award-winning rovers for NASA to building intelligent underwater vehicles, I thrive on turning complex robotics concepts into reality. As an AI and Robotics student at VIT Chennai, I am dedicated to mastering the full stack of autonomous systems, from low-level hardware to high-level AI-driven decision-making.

My journey in robotics leadership began with the NASA Human Exploration Rover Challenge 2021, where I spearheaded the technical team to a 3rd place global victory. This experience taught me invaluable lessons in project management, system design, and leading a team under pressure.

Today, I'm channeling that experience as the Head of R&D for Dreadnought Robotics, tackling the unique challenges of underwater autonomy for SAUVC 2026 & TAC 2026. My hands-on skills were recently sharpened during a research internship at NIT Rourkela, where I successfully built and deployed an autonomous robot using SLAM on the powerful Jetson Orin platform.

• Robotics research Intern
  NIT Rourkela · Rourkela
  May 2024 — Jul 2024

  Engineered a real-time multi-sensor autonomous robotic platform integrating SLAM, obstacle avoidance, and
  human-following capabilities for indoor service environments.
  Implemented SLAM fused with MPU-6050 IMU data on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano.
  Developed a dynamic human-following system using an Intel RealSense D435 and YOLOv8n, fusing RGB-D 3D spatial
  coordinates with the ROS navigation stack for obstacle-aware tracking.

• Vellore Institute Of Technology, Chennai Campus
  Btech Computer Science Engineering with Specialization in AI and Robotics · 8.03
  2023 — 2027