Shailendra Sekhar

About

Hi, I'm Shailendra.

I'm a PhD student at the Robotics Research Center, IIIT Hyderabad, advised by Prof. K. Madhava Krishna. My work lives in autonomous driving, and like most PhD students I follow the interesting problems wherever they go.

An illustrated portrait of Shailendra, smiling in glasses and a striped T-shirt, beside the bronze IEEE Milestone plaque for SHAKEY, the first mobile intelligent robot, on a brick wall.
Illustrated, beside the IEEE Milestone plaque for SHAKEY.

What I work on

Autonomous driving is a stack of problems rather than one, and I work across it: perception, planning, navigation, multi-agent interaction, and analysing how drivers actually behave.

What ties it together is that roads are shared with people, and people are hard to model. Most of us treat traffic law the way we treat Terms and Conditions: accepted, never read. So I lean on data. To borrow from Dr. House, everybody lies. Trajectories don't.

  • Perception
  • Planning
  • Navigation
  • Multi-agent systems
  • Driver behaviour

The road so far

Electronics and communication first, then data science, then AI and robotics, and now cars.

  1. 2025 – nowPhD, Computer ScienceRobotics Research Center, IIIT HyderabadHyderabad
  2. 2024 – 2025Young Research AssistantiHub-Data, IIIT HyderabadHyderabad
  3. 2024Graduate Research AssistantHeterogeneous Robotics Lab, University of GeorgiaAthens, GA
  4. 2021 – 2024M.S. Artificial IntelligenceUniversity of GeorgiaAthens, GA
  5. 2019Data Science InternNational University of SingaporeSingapore
  6. 2015 – 2019B.Tech, Electronics & CommunicationGITAM UniversityHyderabad

Off the clock

I'm a movie buff, and I still go looking for what's playing around the city. Board games take up more of my shelf than they should, the guitar is still on the deck, and I've recently started building LEGO. When I can get out of the city, I hike.

  • Shailendra in the Computer History Museum, under an arch of lit-up panels from computing history.
    Computer History Museum, Mountain View
  • Shailendra standing inside the hollow trunk of a giant redwood in a forest.
    Inside a hollow redwood, on a hike
  • Shailendra smiling beside SHAKEY the robot in its glass display case.
    With SHAKEY, the first mobile robot that could reason about its own actions

Say hello

Write to me about autonomous driving, a film I should see, a board game worth learning, or a good trail near Hyderabad.