Rishika Bera

Lattice Print Path Planning with Reinforcement Learning

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 14:15:05 +0700

This project tackles print path planning for lattice structures using reinforcement learning. Given a lattice (vertices + edges from LatticeQuery), the goal is to find the order to print every strut without the nozzle colliding with already printed material.

Robotic 3D Printing with a Meca500

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Fri, 10 Jul 2026 14:15:05 +0700

Overview

I built a ROS 2 package that drives a Meca500 6-DOF arm (5 μm resolution) as a 3D printer through MoveIt 2. A custom ros2_control hardware interface bridges the Meca500’s proprietary TCP API to MoveIt 2, so real trajectory planning and execution run on the physical arm. A mounted Ender3 extruder handles filament feed and heating over USB serial — the arm does all of the XYZ motion.

YOLO Distillation for Real-Time Inference on a Raspberry Pi Zero

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:15:05 +0700

Joint project with Theo Coulson, Northwestern University

Distilling a fine-tuned YOLO detector into a custom architecture small enough to run in real time on a Raspberry Pi Zero 2W, so a drone can spot and land on a landing platform on its own — at about a tenth of the teacher’s parameter count. Read the full report for the complete writeup.

Sketch2Real - Colored Sketch to Photorealistic Image Generation

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Sat, 09 May 2026 14:15:05 +0700

Sketch2Real generates photorealistic images from colored sketches using a conditional diffusion model built on a U-Net architecture, trained on the COCO dataset.

Teleoperated Ground-Air Morphing Robot

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 14:15:05 +0700

Overview

This is a teleoperated transformer robot that can switch between flight and ground modes. I started with an F450 drone frame and designed a hinge mechanism on each arm: when the arms are straight, the robot flies as a quadcopter powered by brushless motors; when the arms fold down, it becomes a wheeled ground vehicle with wheels driven by mini servo motors. The folding itself is also actuated by servo motors.

EKF SLAM with unknown data association

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Sun, 22 Mar 2026 14:15:05 +0700

Overview

Built a complete EKF SLAM pipeline from scratch in C++ using ROS 2, simulated on a TurtleBot3. The robot localizes itself and maps cylindrical landmarks simultaneously using wheel odometry and 2D LiDAR. Three robots are visualized: red (ground truth, known only to the simulator), blue (odometry estimate, which drifts over time), and green (SLAM corrected estimate). The video shows the robot driving a closed path with sensor noise and limited detection range. As odometry drifts, the EKF corrects it by fusing landmark observations, keeping the green path close to ground truth while blue diverges. Landmark estimates in green converge toward their true positions with repeated observations.

Jack-in-the-Box

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:15:05 +0700

Outer Box Frames

The frame at the center of the outer box is obtained by translating the world frame to the box center and then rotating it by the box orientation \(\theta_{\text{box}}\).

Mrs. Catfisher - The Bug Sorter

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Fri, 12 Dec 2025 14:15:05 +0700

This was a group project by Halley Zhong, Nolan Knight, Miguel, and myself for Northwestern’s MECH_ENG 450: Embedded Systems in Robotics course. We built an autonomous system to sort moving HexBugs using the Franka Arm. My role was to develop the vision system, which can detect, uniquely label, and track the moving bugs in real time.

RRT for 2D Path Planning

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Thu, 11 Sep 2025 14:15:05 +0700

An RRT is a set of vertices (configurations) and edges (connections between configurations). Each iteration samples a random point in the domain, finds the nearest existing vertex, and takes a small step of size \(\Delta\) toward the sample. If you run it for long enough, you get close to uniform coverage over the whole space.

Underwater Manipulator

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Tue, 15 Oct 2024 22:45:37 +0700

This was a group project done in the Vibration Lab in IIT Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India under the guidance of Prof. Barun Pratiher and Nithin Tripathi

Team Members: Rishika Bera, Vellore Sahithi

This project focuses on building a simulation and control system for an underwater robotic arm designed to pick and place objects in submerged environments. The system combines servo motors, a gripper, encoders, and path-planning algorithms to achieve accurate and reliable object handling. A rack and pinion mechanism is used for vertical motion, and the whole setup was tested using both physical hardware and Simulink simulations.

Primer Curator

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Mon, 29 Jul 2024 14:15:05 +0700

This was the poster for the Summer Undergrad Research Internship I did at Purdue University, West Lafayette, where I received the SURF fellowship.

About

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rishika Bera

M.S. in Robotics @ Northwestern

Hi! I’m Rishika, a graduate student in the M.S. Robotics program at Northwestern University. I completed my B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Jodhpur, and I’m passionate about developing intelligent robotic solutions with a focus on LLMs and autonomous systems.

Resume

berarishika@gmail.com (Rishika Bera) — Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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