Boston, MA · Robotics & Mechatronics
Where bare-metal electronics meet control software.
Robotics & Mechatronics Engineer — embedded systems, industrial automation, and control.
I'm Sai Kiran Athaluri, a robotics and mechatronics engineer who builds systems where physical hardware and control software meet. I'm completing my MS in Robotics at Northeastern University (Mechatronics & ECE concentration, expected Dec 2026), after a B.Tech in Robotics & Automation from SRM University. My work lives at the boundary between bare-metal electronics and high-level architecture — master-slave microcontroller networks, state-machine firmware, sensor fusion, and the CAD and analog-circuit work that makes them real. From autonomous guided vehicles and gas-leak detection robots to lab-grade instruments I've designed from the ADC up, I gravitate toward problems that won't let you skip either the mechanical or the software half. I'm looking for roles in robotics, manufacturing, and industrial automation.
MS, Robotics — Mechatronics & ECE concentration
Coursework — Robotics Sensing & Navigation, Mobile Robotics, Robot Mechanics, Control Systems Engineering, Mechatronic Systems
Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech), Robotics & Automation
Coursework — Computer Architecture, Manufacturing Technology, Robotics Engineering & Applications, Kinematics & Dynamics of Robots, Mechatronic Systems, Artificial Intelligence & Expert Systems
12 builds · pick as you scroll
A mobile robotic platform for inspecting oil & gas infrastructure — it patrols a facility, fuses MQ-series VOC gas sensors with MLX90640 thermal imaging to spot the cold spots left by expanding leaking gas, and syncs stationary + mobile ESP32 nodes over MQTT.
End-to-end AGV built for cost-effective, sustainable industrial use. A dynamic state machine (Active/Standby/Deep Sleep) plus MOSFET peripheral power gating and tuned PWM delivered a ~12% reduction in energy consumption while holding navigational performance.
Custom Python ROS drivers characterize sensor noise via Allan Variance and fuse magnetometer + gyro yaw with a complementary filter; a causal “moving-frame” zero-velocity update compensates IMU drift, and kinematics (accounting for sensor offset from the center of mass) reconstruct the trajectory against GPS ground truth.
A 17-DOF aluminum bipedal robot driven by an 18-channel servo controller, with dual-mode teleoperation over a PS2 wireless joystick and a Wi-Fi-hosted ESP32 web server.
A master-slave benchtop system mimicking commercial continuous-culture platforms — a Raspberry Pi orchestrates and logs while an Arduino handles real-time sensor polling and peristaltic-pump actuation, all housed in custom Fusion 360 enclosures.
A portable, low-cost spectrophotometer measuring OD600 directly in 19 mm culture tubes. Built across two iterations — from a prototype validating the optical path (analog photodiodes vs. a TSL2591 digital sensor) to a standalone smart device (Arduino Nano 33 IoT, capacitive TFT UI, light-baffled 3D-printed chassis). Beer-Lambert + a 4-Parameter Logistic regression map raw absorbance to a SpectraMax benchmark.
A benchtop chamber (20–80 °C) for polymer-degradation testing and sample incubation, with a two-phase (pre-heat/hold) closed-loop algorithm to minimize overshoot, a capacitive touchscreen UI, dual-channel CCT lighting for time-lapse imaging, and software over-temp safety.
A compact CH₄ monitor for sealed lab vials — a Seeed XIAO ESP32C3 + SEN0565 methane sensor + I²C OLED, in a Fusion 360 enclosure with a butyl-rubber-stopper collar for airtight syringe injections without breaking the anaerobic environment.
Reverse-engineered a commercial LOMI composter to drop its operating temperature from ~100 °C to a biologically useful ~50 °C — not by touching the firmware, but by soldering a precision parallel resistor across the NTC thermistor (CN5) to bias the analog feedback loop. Characterized empirically with a DS1922T iButton; a 19.3 kΩ resistor settled at ~49.6 °C.
A localized IoT network — a NodeMCU (ESP8266) edge controller driving a 16-channel opto-isolated relay module to safely switch high-voltage appliances and lab equipment, with PIR/LDR smart-lighting energy optimization and a custom MIT App Inventor Android dashboard.
A teleoperated NodeMCU rover that scans book ISBNs with a TTL barcode scanner and queries a Python/Flask mock database over a REST API to return shelving coordinates.
Capstone smart-irrigation system — a NodeMCU RC rover with a submersible pump distributes water across irregular garden areas, while capacitive soil-moisture + DHT11 sensors stream to ThingSpeak for real-time analytics and remote threshold management.
As a Core Member of the university Incubation Center, led and instructed university-wide workshops on embedded systems (Arduino, NodeMCU) and drone technology. Mentored students on hands-on robotics projects — IR line-followers, ultrasonic obstacle-avoiders, and drone stability/flight — and organized and ran a university-level hackathon.
Selected to compete in an All-India hackathon focused on high-impact energy-saving solutions for industrial material handling and transport. Proposed and designed an optimized AGV-based material handling system showing how to leverage existing port infrastructure to drastically cut electricity waste from inefficient transport.
The fastest way to reach me is email —athaluri.s@northeastern.edu orathalurisaikiran@gmail.com. I'm looking for roles in robotics, manufacturing, and industrial automation.