Nishanth Adithya Chandramouli

MS in Robotics Engineering at WPI

Worcester, MA 01609

Hi 👋🏻! I am Nishanth, a Master of Science student in Robotics Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) working in the Perception and Autonomous Robotics (PeAR) Lab with Prof. Nitin Sanket and Prof. Connor McCann. My work focuses on co-optimizing the mechanical design and control strategies of a drone shell to improve how a quadcopter orients itself before and after impact. This enables stable, high-speed traversal through dense forests for search-and-rescue missions, allowing drones to safely bounce off obstacles instead of crashing.

Before joining WPI, I worked in the Manipulators Robotics Group at Robotics Lab, IIT Madras with Prof. Sandipan Bandyopadhyay on the design and analysis of parallel manipulators, including analytical geometric modeling, constraint formulation, real-time collision detection, and path planning for multi-DOF robotic systems. My work and research interests span perception, geometric modeling, vision-based robotic manipulation, and motion planning.

Selected Publications

A Comprehensive Analysis of the Spherical Joint in A 6-6 Stewart-Gough Platform Manipulator and its Effects on the Joint Limit Compliant Workspace

Nishanth Adithya Chandramouli and Sandipan Bandyopadhyay

SSRN, 2025

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This article presents a comprehensive study of the effect of motions limits of the passive joints on a parallel manipulator on its workspace. The formulation is developed and demonstrated in the context of a fully spatial parallel manipulator, namely, the Stewart-Gough platform manipulator, which incorporates passive joints of spherical nature. The largest spherical subset of the position workspace free of the above-mentioned issue is referred to as the joint limit compliant workspace (JLCW). For a fixed orientation of the moving platform (MP) of the manipulator, the corresponding limiting surface, which turns out to be a right-circular cone, is determined analytically. The analysis is further extended to a specified orientation workspace, albeit in a discrete manner. Subsequently, the JLCW is determined by computing the minimum enclosing cone (MECo) of a set of cones emanating from a given point. The results are verified numerically by comparing them with those obtained using other methods. A parametric study is conducted to demonstrate the practical utility of the proposed analysis.
@article{chandramouli2025spherical_joint, title = {A Comprehensive Analysis of the Spherical Joint in A 6-6 Stewart-Gough Platform Manipulator and its Effects on the Joint Limit Compliant Workspace}, author = {Chandramouli, Nishanth Adithya and Bandyopadhyay, Sandipan}, year = {2025}, journal = {SSRN}, doi = {http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.5766082}, }
A Semi-Analytical Approach Towards Determining the Largest Collision-Free Sphere in R3 Inside the Effective Regular Workspace of a 6-6 Stewart-Gough Platform Manipulator Corresponding to a Given Orientation Workspace

Nishanth Adithya Chandramouli and Sandipan Bandyopadhyay

Mechanism and Machine Theory, 2026

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This article focusses on the problem of interference among the links of a parallel robot, namely, the StewartGough platform manipulator. The geometry of the legs is approximated by capsules, leading to the detection of collision among any pair of legs in terms of tangency of the corresponding capsules. Analytical conditions for the said cases of tangency are derived in closed-form, which manifest geometrically as certain quadrics in space. Through a thorough study and explicit characterisation of these surfaces, novel analytical methods are developed to find the largest spheres in space which are tangent to these surfaces. Such spheres are free of possibilities of link collisions, and they can be derived analytically for a given orientation of the moving platform of the manipulator. The analysis is subsequently extended to the orientation workspace of the manipulator by repeating the above-mentioned computations over a large number of discrete samples. The results obtained are verified numerically by comparing them with those generated from other sources. A parametric study is performed to demonstrate the utility of the proposed analysis in practice.
@article{chandramouli2025collision_free_sphere, title = {A Semi-Analytical Approach Towards Determining the Largest Collision-Free Sphere in R3 Inside the Effective Regular Workspace of a 6-6 Stewart-Gough Platform Manipulator Corresponding to a Given Orientation Workspace}, author = {Chandramouli, Nishanth Adithya and Bandyopadhyay, Sandipan}, keywords = {Stewart-Gough platform manipulator, Capsule, Collision surface, Collision-free sphere, Axisymmetric surface, Extruded surface}, year = {2026}, journal = {Mechanism and Machine Theory}, doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.mechmachtheory.2025.106331}, }