Sai Kothakota
Robotics Engineer at PAL Robotics
Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolSai Kothakota is a robotics engineer with 11 years of experience building real-time control systems and autonomy for mobile manipulators, humanoids and inventory robots at PAL Robotics. He designs and deploys controllers that run up to 2 kHz, develops perception and grasping stacks, and creates validation and tooling for large-scale robot fleets like Stockbot. An active open-source contributor and ROS/ROS2 maintainer, he has modernized aruco_ros for ROS2 and mentors Google Summer of Code projects on dynamic payload analysis and hardware diagnostics. Sai combines a strong academic background in control and robotics with hands-on systems-level debugging—having also contributed to NASA’s winning Space Robotics Challenge entry—bringing both deep technical rigor and practical deployment experience.
11 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
ICSE, Primary and Secondary Education, 74.29, ICSE, Primary and Secondary Education, 74.29 at St. Joseph's High SchoolHigh School, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, 88.7, High School, Physics, Chemistry and Mathematics, 88.7 at KKR's Sri Chaitanya Junior KalasalaUPC Universitat Politècnica de CatalunyaBachelor of Technology (BTech), Mechanical Engineering, 9.199, Bachelor of Technology (BTech), Mechanical Engineering, 9.199 at SASTRA University
English, Tamil, Telugu, Spanish
Github Skills (6)
ros10
cprogramming-language9
c-language9
opencv9
robot7
robotics7
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
pal-robotics/aruco_ros
Feb 2022 - Nov 2022
Software package and ROS wrappers of the Aruco Augmented Reality marker detector library
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 60 commits, 2 PRs in 9 months
Contributions summary:Sai primarily focused on maintaining and migrating code within the `aruco_ros` package. They addressed issues related to camera matrix handling in the context of non-rectified images, and contributed to updating the changelog files across multiple packages. The user also refactored the `aruco_ros_utils.cpp` file for ROS2 compatibility and updated nodes for ROS2, demonstrating a focus on keeping the codebase current with ROS standards. Finally, the user performed some minor changes in the `CHANGELOG.rst` file of multiple repositories.
realitymarkerdetectoraugmentedaugmented-reality
pal-robotics/pal_navigation_sm
Jun 2019 - Feb 2023
Contributions:2 reviews, 5 PRs, 4 pushes in 3 years 8 months
navigationadvanced-navigationmove-base
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