Ph.D. Student, Mechanical Engineering
Joined Summer 2024
- B.E., Mechanical Engineering, Tribhuvan University, 2022
Nitesh is a Ph.D. student in Mechanical Engineering and a Graduate Research Assistant at Iowa State University. He joined the lab in Summer 2024. His research focuses on reinforcement learning (RL) for robotic manipulation, robot navigation using large language and vision-language models, and model predictive control (MPC), including the control of dual-arm robots and drones. He is particularly interested in deep reinforcement learning and its applications to improving the efficiency and performance of robotic systems.
Research interests: Reinforcement learning for robotic manipulation, robot navigation with LLMs/VLMs, model predictive control
Publications with the lab (4)
- LCLA: Language-Conditioned Latent Alignment for Vision-Language Navigation — arXiv (2026)
- Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Point-to-Point UAV Navigation — arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.13943 (2025)
- Find the fruit: Designing a zero-shot sim2real deep rl planner for occlusion aware plant manipulation — IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA 2026), in press (2026)
Show all 4
- Can Pretrained Vision-Language Embeddings Alone Guide Robot Navigation? — Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) 2025 Workshop on Robot Planning in the Era of Foundation Models (FM4RoboPlan) (2025)