/ about

Hardware-trained, model-pilled.

Rugved Katole — PhD candidate in Computer Science at The Ohio State University (expected 2029), with a B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from BITS Pilani. 4+ years bridging hardware and AI to ship autonomous systems that work outside the lab.

As a Graduate Research Associate at OSU, I pioneer techniques in world foundation models and Vision-Language-Action (VLA) systems to tackle data scarcity in robotics. This includes augmenting video datasets for faster inference (5.9× speedup) and building NVIDIA Omniverse-based digital twins for simulating animal behaviors — enabling ecologists to test drone algorithms virtually before deployment.

Previously at IIT Bombay's TIH Foundation and ARMS Lab, I led deployments in autonomous navigation and multi-agent planning. I've also spearheaded a $100K research grant, mentored students, and taught ROS 2 courses.

/ trajectory Career timeline

  1. 2024 — Present

    PhD Candidate · Graduate Research Associate

    The Ohio State University

    • World foundation models + Vision-Language-Action systems for general-purpose robotics.
    • Photoreal NVIDIA Omniverse digital twins for wildlife behavior simulation.
    • 5.9× video augmentation speedup for sample-efficient policy learning.
  2. 2022 — 2024

    Research Engineer

    IIT Bombay · TIH Foundation & ARMS Lab

    • Led deployments in autonomous navigation and multi-agent planning.
    • Built decentralized AV intersection management — 0 deadlocks across 255 scenarios.
    • Mentored students and shipped ROS 2 course material.
  3. 2018 — 2022

    B.E. Mechanical Engineering

    BITS Pilani

    • Foundation in mechanical systems, control, and instrumentation.
    • MEMS pressure sensor research for subsea pipeline leak detection.

/ tooling Technical expertise

AI & Foundation Models

  • VLA Models
  • World Models
  • Diffusion
  • Computer Vision
  • PyTorch
  • JAX
  • TensorFlow

Robotics Systems

  • ROS 2
  • Gazebo
  • Isaac Sim
  • CARLA
  • Omniverse
  • SLAM
  • Motion/Behavior Planning
  • MATLAB

Engineering & Infra

  • C/C++
  • Python
  • Linux
  • Docker
  • Singularity
  • Slurm/HPC
  • Git/CI-CD
  • CUDA
/ collaborate

Open to industry research roles for Summer 2026.

Best reached over email or LinkedIn — happy to chat about world models, VLA, or sim-to-real.

Email me → LinkedIn