Nikhil Shinde
(Co-Advised with Michael Yip)
Email: nshinde (at) ucsd.edu
Nikhil Shinde is a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD. Nikhil's research direction is motivated by his interests in the field of automation and surgical robotics. He is interested in reinforcement learning and adapting already learned techniques to new data as it presents itself online. In particular his current research focuses on safely reasoning to interact with complex, deformable and interconnected environments online. Nikhil is a recipient of the National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship.
Before joining UCSD, Nikhil received his bachelor's degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from UC Berkeley. While there, his research interests revolved around learned wireless communication systems.
In his free time Nikhil enjoys hiking, backpacking, mountaineering, camping and all things outdoors.
Selected Projects
Selecting actions for a surgical robot to both infer tissue structure (e.g. sutured regions) while maintaining safety (without damaging the tissue)
Safe online learning for interaction: composing object-centric Gaussian process regression to interact with objects safely despite uncertainty in the interaction
Related Papers
Liang, X., Chung-Pang, W., Shinde, N., Liu, F., Richter, F., Yip, M. MEDiC: Autonomous Surgical Robotic Assistance to Maximizing Exposure for Dissection and Cautery. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) 2025.
Shinde, Nikhil U., et al. “JIGGLE: An Active Sensing Framework for Boundary Parameters Estimation in Deformable Surgical Environments.” Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS). 2024.
Shinde, Nikhil U., et al. “SURESTEP: An Uncertainty-Aware Trajectory Optimization Framework to Enhance Visual Tool Tracking for Robust Surgical Automation.” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, 2024.
Begzadić, Azra Nikhil Uday Shinde, Sander Tonkens, Dylan Hirsch, Kaleb Ugalde, Michael C Yip, Jorge Cortés, and Sylvia Herbert. “Back to Base: Towards Hands-Off Learning via Safe Resets with Reach-Avoid Safety Filters.” Learning for Dynamics and Control (L4DC) 2025.
Shinde, Nikhil U., et al. "Object-Centric Representations for Interactive Online Learning with Non-Parametric Methods." IEEE 19th International Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE). IEEE, 2023.
Peiros, Elizabeth, et al. "Finding biomechanically safe trajectories for robot manipulation of the human body in a search and rescue scenario." IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, 2023.