Sarvesh Patil

Hello, welcome to my half quirky - half stereotypical academic website! I’m a third-year PhD in Robotics advised by Prof. Max Simchowitz. Prior to that, for my 1st 2 years of PhD and MS in Robotics at CMU, I was advised by Prof. Oliver Kroemer and Prof. Zeynep Temel.

As a PhD student I’m trying to understand the principles behind reinforcement learning, variational inference, and representation learning and how each can be effectively applied to learn highly specialized fine-grained & dexterous manipulation skills across a wide range of application domains.

Previously, as a Master’s student, I developed an array of 64 soft delta robots in an 8x8 grid to push the limits of dexterous manipulation with non-anthropomorphic soft robots. For the 1st 2 years of my PhD, I developed a sample efficient Multi-Agent Behavior Cloning & Reinforcement Learning pipeline with zero-shot sim2real deployment for planar object manipulation using the soft delta robot array.

Prior to joining CMU I used to work in HyperWorks Imaging, a small startup in Bangalore, where I worked on making conditional GANs and vision-based inference pipelines to save a few millions of dollars for Sila Nanotechnologies developing high energy density batteries. Before that, I did my Bachelors in Engineering at a small college in Mumbai University called VES Institute of Technology on a Tuition Fee Waiver Scheme scholarship.

Please feel free to connect with me if you’re interested in learning actually dexterous manipulation policies, highly sample efficienct reinforcement learning, representation learning for cross task and cross embodiment transfer of learned skills.

news

Sep 2, 2025	Switched Labs! Started working with Prof. Max Simchowitz! 📍Pittsburgh, PA
May 19, 2025	Started Summer Internship at Bosch Center for AI🤖! 📍Pittsburgh, PA
Aug 15, 2024	Co-taught a group of 25 high school students basics of building robots and writing controllers for the Feiyue Summer School Program @CMU 🤖! 📍Pittsburgh, PA
Nov 6, 2023	Organizing a workshop on Learning for Soft Robots at CoRL 2023 ✈️ 📍Atlanta, GA
Oct 1, 2023	Helped organize my 1st workshop on Causality in Robotics at IROS 2023 ✈️ 📍Detroit, MI
May 29, 2023	Excited to present my 2nd research paper on delta arrays at ICRA 2023 ✈️ 📍London, UK
Jan 28, 2023	Admitted for PhD in Robotics at CMU 🤖! 📍Pittsburgh, PA

selected publications

Distributed Dexterous Manipulation with Spatially Conditioned Multi-Agent Transformers (Retracted)

Sarvesh Patil

2025

PDF Code

Enhancing Dexterity in Robotic Manipulation via Hierarchical Contact Exploration

Xianyi Cheng, Sarvesh Patil, Zeynep Temel, Oliver Kroemer, and Matthew T. Mason

2024

Bib HTML PDF

@article{cheng2023enhancing,
  title = {Enhancing Dexterity in Robotic Manipulation via Hierarchical Contact Exploration},
  author = {Cheng, Xianyi and Patil, Sarvesh and Temel, Zeynep and Kroemer, Oliver and Mason, Matthew T.},
  booktitle = {2024 IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL)},
  year = {2024},
  volume = {9},
  number = {1},
  pages = {390-397},
}

Linear Delta Arrays for Compliant Dexterous Distributed Manipulation

Sarvesh Patil, Tony S. Tao, Tess Lee Hellebrekers, Oliver Kroemer, and Fatma Zeynep Temel

2023

Bib HTML PDF

@article{patil2022linear,
  title = {Linear Delta Arrays for Compliant Dexterous Distributed Manipulation},
  author = {Patil, Sarvesh and Tao, Tony S. and Hellebrekers, Tess Lee and Kroemer, Oliver and Temel, Fatma Zeynep},
  booktitle = {2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)},
  year = {2023},
}

DeltaZ: An Accessible Compliant Delta Robot Manipulator for Research and Education

Sarvesh Patil, Samuel C. Alvares, Pragna Mannam, Oliver Kroemer, and Fatma Zeynep Temel

2022

Bib HTML PDF

@article{Patil2022DeltaZAA,
  title = {DeltaZ: An Accessible Compliant Delta Robot Manipulator for Research and Education},
  author = {Patil, Sarvesh and Alvares, Samuel C. and Mannam, Pragna and Kroemer, Oliver and Temel, Fatma Zeynep},
  booktitle = {IROS 2022},
  year = {2022},
  volume = {abs/2207.00721},
}

Multi-Modal Super Resolution for Dense Microscopic Particle Size Estimation

Sarvesh Patil, Chava Y P D Phani Rajanish, and Naveen Margankunte

2020

Bib HTML PDF

@article{Patil2020MultiModalSR,
  title = {Multi-Modal Super Resolution for Dense Microscopic Particle Size Estimation},
  author = {Patil, Sarvesh and Rajanish, Chava Y P D Phani and Margankunte, Naveen},
  booktitle = {ArXiv},
  year = {2020},
  volume = {abs/2010.09594},
}