CHANDRAN
Journey

How I got here.

A forward-chronological trajectory, from a mechanical-engineering undergrad and a single-propeller UAV, through a robotics master’s at TU Delft, to embodied-AI research, a string of hackathon wins, and building agritech robots in a castle in Austria.

  1. 2018-2022
    Education

    I started with mechanical engineering

    NITK Surathkal

    I came into robotics through mechanical engineering, powertrains, mechatronics, and the feeling that robots were the place where hardware, software, control, and people all met. I also started writing and publishing technical projects early, which later became a real habit.

  2. 2021
    Research

    I published my first robotics paper independently

    IEEE ICDTMRA

    This one was not a polished lab pipeline. I wrote and published a TurtleBot3 localization and navigation paper with two juniors, without a professor driving the work. It was scrappy, but it mattered because it made research feel like something I could initiate myself.

    View IEEE paper ↗
  3. 2018-2022
    Project

    I kept building and writing in public

    Hackster

    My early Hackster projects were mechatronics-heavy and imperfect, but they crossed 100k+ cumulative views. That was one of the first signals that documenting technical work could create real surface area around what I was learning.

    View Hackster ↗
  4. 2022-2024
    Education

    Robotics became HRI at TU Delft

    MSc Robotics

    At TU Delft, I finished the robotics master's early, took extra coursework, and kept getting pulled toward human-robot interaction. The question was already forming: if robots are complex, how do people actually understand and work with them?

  5. 2024-2025
    Research

    My thesis turned that into language interfaces

    TU Delft / Frontiers

    For my master's work, I built a hierarchical multi-LLM conversational interface for supermarket robots. It used intent classification, RAG, fine-tuning, speech interaction, and robot navigation. It was HRI, but it was also an early version of my current obsession: making robot behavior easier for humans to supervise.

    Read the Frontiers paper ↗
  6. 2024
    Project

    I shipped Unspool end-to-end

    Solo product

    Unspool was a voice journaling app, not robotics. Still, it mattered: I designed it, coded it, added auth/privacy/cloud sync, and got it through both app stores. It taught me the difference between having an idea and actually shipping the thing.

    Visit Unspool ↗
  7. 2024-2026
    Work

    Qafka gave me real deployment instincts

    Robotics & AI Engineer

    At Qafka, there was a robot, a hard physical problem, and an outcome to deliver. Without the usual academic padding, I had to make perception, control, state machines, embedded actuation, and safety logic work together. That changed how I think about robotics: reliability lives at the interfaces.

  8. 2025
    Award / Win

    I used hackathons as fast robotics labs

    Snap / FORGIS / EF / Junction

    The hackathons were not the identity, but they were useful reps. I won at Snap, FORGIS, and EF, and built a range of things fast along the way: a Dobot pick-and-place demo, an AR Hyrox coach, and an elderly-care robot at Junction. They trained speed, taste, and the habit of getting a physical prototype to actually move.

  9. 2026
    Work

    Alpine Valley became the pivot

    Founder in Residence

    I tried building Latent Robotics around berry harvesting. We built a lot: SO-101 arms, teleoperation data, SmolVLA policies, HG-DAGGER, RL/MuJoCo experiments, and a fully automated fake-plant picking setup. But the sharper realization was not "I am an agri-tech founder." It was that embodied foundation models need interpretability and steerability before they can be trusted in the real world.

  10. 2026
    Research

    The interpretability blog made the bet explicit

    Hugging Face

    The strawberry-pick interpretability post was where the direction clicked: can we build observability layers around black-box robot policies, infer task stages, probe hidden representations, and eventually create handles for steering behavior?

    Read the blog ↗
  11. 2026
    Project

    I started contributing to LeLab

    Hugging Face open source

    LeLab became my first serious open-source robotics contribution path. The work is practical - bug fixes, features, setup, usability - but that is exactly why it matters. Better embodied-AI tooling makes experimentation easier to inspect and repeat.

    View LeLab ↗
  12. Aug 2026
    Work

    Next chapter: Lely

    Rapid Prototyping Engineer

    At Lely, the role is broader than my independent research bet: rapid prototyping across electronics, software, AI/ML, mechanical systems, sensor fusion, and integrated prototypes. It is the professional next chapter; the interpretability and steerability thesis continues through my own research, writing, and open-source work.