Sushant Veer

Senior Research Scientist Autonomous Vehicle Research Group NVIDIA Research Santa Clara, CA, USA

Education

• Postdoctoral Research Associate in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, Princeton University, 2018-2021
  Advisor: Prof. Anirudha Majumdar

• Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering, University of Delaware, 2013-2018
  Advisor: Prof. Ioannis Poulakakis

• B.Tech. in Mechanical Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology Madras, 2009-2013
  Advisor: Prof. Sujatha Srinivasan
  

Research Interests

Broadly, my research interests lie in ensuring the safety of autonomous robotic systems. My current research has two major thrusts:

1. Safe planning for autonomous vehicles (AVs): Driving is a complex task that involves navigating interactive scenarios, anticipating and reacting to other traffic agents, and balancing safety and performance while adhering to traffic laws. To achieve a planning framework that can match human-like performance with enhanced safety capabilities, my work leverages tools from planning & control, optimization, machine learning (ML), and logic.
   Representative Publications: [Veer, Leung, et al., ICRA 2023], [Leung, Veer, at al., ACC 2023].

2. Run-time monitoring and edge-case scenario detection of ML modules in AV stacks: ML-based modules are typically trained to perform well on average over the training data, but they may struggle when faced with out-of-distribution (OOD) data and are susceptible to epistemic and aleatoric uncertainties. To mitigate the impact of these potential failures on AVs, my work focuses on early detection through the use of statistical and logic tools.
   Representative Publications: [*Farid, *Veer, et al., CoRL 2022], [*Farid, *Veer, at al., CoRL 2021] (* Equal Contribution).

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