Kallol Saha

I'm looking for PhD positions in the Fall 2026 intake!

I am an MSR student at The Robotics Institute, CMU. I am fortunate to be advised by Prof. David Held and Prof. Maxim Likhachev. Previously, I was at RRC, IIIT Hyderabad advised by Prof. Madhava Krishna. Prior to that, I was a part of Project Manas at Manipal Institute of Technology

I work on developing hybrid learning-and-planning methods for robotics and other long-horizon problems. My goal is to create generalist agents that reason about the effects of their actions on the world, by leveraging prior experience (data), while continually learning and planning. Ideally, such agents should not only imitate demonstrations but also be able to improvise and surpass the performance of the provided data. (An example of this is on my recent project!)

The preferred way of contacting me is through email: ksaha@cs.cmu.edu

Highlights

(Click for details)

Timeline

[ Sep 2025 ] I will be attending CoRL 2025 in person!
[ Aug 2025 ] Our latest work on 3D Visual Planning - SPOT is accepted to CoRL 2025!
[ Jul 2025 ] GPD is accepted to CASE 2025!
[ Aug 2024 ] Started at The Robotics Institute, CMU as an MSR student with Prof. David Held and Prof. Maxim Likhachev
[ 13-18 May 2024 ] I will be attending ICRA 2024 in person
[ Jan 2024 ] Our latest work EDMP was accepted to ICRA 2024!
[ Aug 2023 ] Graduated from Manipal Institute of Technology with a B-Tech in Mechatronics
[ Jun 2023 ] I will be presenting lectures on Robot Kinematics and Deep Learning at the RRC Summer School
[ Jun 2023 ] "Disentangling Planning and Control for Non-prehensile Tabletop Manipulation" accepted at CASE 2023!
[ Jan 2023 ] Joined the Robotics Research Center (RRC), IIIT Hyderabad as a Research Associate under Prof. Madhava Krishna
[ Jun 2022 ] Started my summer research internship at e-Yantra, IIT Bombay
[ Apr 2022 ] Our team won first prize at the e-Yantra Robotics Competition, IIT Bombay!
[ Jun 2021 ] Started a remote research internship at IIT Guwahati
[ May 2021 ] Elected as Team Manager of Project Manas
[ Feb 2020 ] Recruited as a Mechanics Member at Project Manas

Publications

(* Denotes equal contribution. Click on publication to view more)

Planning from Point Clouds over Continuous Actions for Multi-object Rearrangement

Kallol Saha*, Amber Li*, Angela Rodriguez-Izquierdo*, Lifan Yu, Ben Eisner, Maxim Likhachev, David Held
CoRL 2025 (Oral Presentation - top 5.7%)
Webpage • Paper • Code

GPD: Guided Polynomial Diffusion for Motion Planning

Ajit Srikanth*, Parth Mahanjan*, Kallol Saha*, Vishal Mandadi*, Pranjal Paul, Pawan Wadhwani, Brojeshwar Bhowmick, Arun Singh, Madhava Krishna
CASE 2025
Webpage • Paper • Video • Code

EDMP: Ensemble-of-costs-guided Diffusion for Motion Planning

Kallol Saha*, Vishal Mandadi*, Jayaram Reddy*, Ajit Srikanth, Aditya Agarwal, Bipasha Sen,
Arun Singh, Madhava Krishna
ICRA 2024
Webpage • Paper • Video • Code

Disentangling Planning and Control for Non-prehensile Tabletop Manipulation

Vishal Mandadi, Kallol Saha, Dipanwita Guhathakurta, M. Nomaan Qureshi, Aditya Agarwal, Bipasha Sen,
Dipanjan Das, Brojeshwar Bhowmick, Arun Singh, Madhava Krishna
CASE 2023
Paper • Video

Projects

(Click on project to view more)

Major Projects

Decision Making for Swarm Robots

Aditya Singhal, Kallol Saha, Rikin Ramachandran, Umesh Mane, Soofiyan Atar, Harmanjeet Singh Bilkhu
Done during the e-Yantra Summer Internship Program 2022, CSE Department, IIT Bombay
Video • Certificate

Dairy Bike

Kallol Saha (Team lead), Ashwin Disa, Srujan Kulkarni, Tanaya Gupte
First Prize Winner, e-Yantra Robotics Competition 2021-22, CSE Department, IIT Bombay
Video • Competition Video • Certificate

Project Manas

I am an alumni of the 2020-22 batch. Meet the current team here.
A Student Project on AI and Robotics at Manipal Institute of Technology
Webpage • Projects • More Pictures • Rise Prize Certificate • IPAS 2021 Certificate

Nirikshak Bot

Kallol Saha (Team lead), Shubham Shetty, Tanaya Gupte, Twinkle Goyal
e-Yantra Robotics Competition 2020-21, CSE Department, IIT Bombay
Video • Code • Certificate

Mini Projects

Micromouse Navigation

Sadha Sivam M, Kallol Saha, Basireddy Sandeep Reddy
Done during a research internship at IIT Guwahati, 2021
Code • Certificate

Gesture Controlled Rover

Kallol Saha (Team lead), Shubham Shetty, Anirudh Bharadwaj, Manu Vishwanath, Ayan Verma, Aloysius De Sa
Robotics Lab Final Project, 2022
Report • Video • Code

Teaching & Mentoring

Served as a Teaching Assistant for the Geometry-based Methods in Vision course, taught by Prof. Michael Kaess.
I co-mentored an undergraduate intern (Prakhar Agarwal) from IIT Delhi who joined the R-PAD Lab under Prof. David Held in the summer of 2025
I taught two lectures at the RRC Summer School 2023. The first lecture delved into the topics of Robot Kinematics and Quaternions, while the second focused on Deep Learning. The lecture on deep learning is available here.
I served as a teaching assistant for the robotics laboratory course at Manipal Institute of Technology, where my responsibilities included
mentoring students in ROS programming and sim2real transfer. Here is the certificate.
During my tenure at Project Manas, I mentored junior team members in tasks related to mechanics, design and programming. Additionally, I conducted interviews to assess potential candidates interested in joining the team.