Python on 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.

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.