Zac Ravichandran

ZacRavichandran_Headshot1_cut.jpg

Hi! I’m a second year PhD Student in The GRASP Lab at The University of Pennsylvania, where I’m co-advised by Vijay Kumar and George J. Pappas. I’m broadly interested in semantic planning and active perception for single and multi-robot systems. I’m gratefully supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

I was previously research staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory, where I worked on a range of robotics problems including closed-loop perception, planning, and reinforcement learning. My work spanned research, development, and educational applications. I also fielded my work in a variety of contexts including air-ground teaming.

Before that, I graduated summa cum laude from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a minor in Computer Science.

publications

2024

  1. Under Review
    Jailbreaking LLM-Controlled Robots
    Alexander Robey, Zachary Ravichandran, Vijay Kumar, Hamed Hassani, and George J. Pappas
    Under Review, 2024
  2. Under Review
    SPINE: Online Semantic Planning for Missions with Incomplete Natural Language Specifications in Unstructured Environments
    Zachary Ravichandran, Varun Murali, Mariliza Tzes, George J. Pappas, and Vijay Kumar
    Under Review, 2024
  3. ICRA 24 WS
    Challenges and Opportunities for Large-Scale Exploration with Air-Ground Teams using Semantics
    Fernando Cladera, Ian D Miller, Zachary Ravichandran, Varun Murali, Jason Hughes, M Ani Hsieh, CJ Taylor, and Vijay Kumar
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation Workshops, 2024
  4. ICRA 24
    Enabling Large-scale Heterogeneous Collaboration with Opportunistic Communications
    Fernando Cladera, Zachary Ravichandran, Ian D Miller, M Ani Hsieh, CJ Taylor, and Vijay Kumar
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2024

2022

  1. ICRA 22
    Hierarchical Representations and Explicit Memory: Learning Effective Navigation Policies on 3D Scene Graphs using Graph Neural Networks
    Zachary Ravichandran, Lisa Peng, Nathan Hughes, J. Daniel Griffith, and Luca Carlone
    International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2022

2020

  1. Tech. Report
    Bridging Task Execution and Scene Understanding with Flexible Simulation Environments
    Zachary Ravichandran, J. Daniel Griffith, Benjamin Smith, and Constantine Frost
    Technical Report, Nov 2020