Sarthak Mishra

Robotics Research Center (RRC)
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India

I am currently pursuing my MS by Research with a specialization in Robotics, where I am advised by Prof. Spandan Roy . My main research deals with language guided aerial manipulation and robot control.
Previously, I worked as a Research Associate on a medical robotics project with AIIMS New Delhi funded by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR).

Email / Google Scholar / GitHub / LinkedIn

Project Highlights

News

Research

AeroPlace-Flow: Language-Grounded Object Placement for Aerial Manipulators via Visual Foresight and Object Flow
Sarthak Mishra, Rishabh Dev Yadav, Naveen Nair, Wei Pan and Spandan Roy.
Accepted for publication at IEEE IROS 2026
Paper / Video / Website
In this work, we present AeroPlace-Flow, a training-free framework for language-grounded aerial object placement that unifies visual foresight with explicit 3D geometric reasoning and object flow.
AERMANI-VLM: Structured Prompting and Reasoning for Aerial Manipulation with Vision Language Models
Sarthak Mishra, Rishabh Dev Yadav, Avirup Das, Saksham Gupta, Wei Pan and Spandan Roy.
Accepted for publication at IEEE IROS 2026
Paper / Video / Website
We present AERMANI-VLM, a framework that adapts pretrained vision-language models for language-guided aerial manipulation by separating high-level reasoning from low-level control without task-specific fine-tuning.
AeroGrab: A Unified Framework for Aerial Grasping in Cluttered Environments
Shivansh Pratap Singh, Naveen Sudheer Nair, Samaksh Ujjawal, Sarthak Mishra, Soham Patil, Rishabh Dev Yadav, and Spandan Roy.
Accepted for publication at IEEE IROS 2026
Paper
In this work, we present an integrated pipeline for reliable aerial grasping in cluttered environments. Given a scene and a language instruction, the system identifies the target object and actively explores it to gain better views of the object. During exploration, a grasp generation network predicts multiple 6-DoF grasp candidates for each view. Each candidate is evaluated and the best grasp is selected and executed.
AERMANI-PLACE: Language Guided Object Placement with Aerial Manipulators
Sarthak Mishra, Ritama Sanyal, Rishabh Dev Yadav, Wei Pan and Spandan Roy.
Accepted for publication at IEEE CASE 2026
Paper / Video
In this work, we present AERMANI-PLACE, a framework for language-guided object placement with aerial manipulators. Given a scene image and a natural language instruction, an image editing model generates a modified version of the scene containing a visual marker that indicates where the object should be placed. This marker is then grounded into the physical environment using depth observations to recover a metric place point, after which a placement trajectory is generated and executed by the aerial manipulator.
Adaptive Artificial Time-Delay Control with Barrier Lyapunov Constraints for Euler–Lagrange Robots
Saksham Gupta, Rishabh Dev Yadav, Sarthak Mishra, Amitabh Sharma, Sourish Ganguly, Wei Pan, Spandan Roy and Simone Baldi.
Accepted for publication at IEEE CASE 2026
Paper
We addresses the challenge of simultaneously compensating for state-dependent uncertainties and enforcing time-varying state constraints in Euler–Lagrange systems—common requirements in robotics yet underserved by existing control designs. A novel adaptive control framework is developed that combines an artificial time delay based uncertainty estimation (aka time delay estimation, TDE) with a barrier Lyapunov function to enforce constraint-aware control design.
Bab_Sak Robotic Intubation System (BRIS): A Learning-Enabled Control Framework for Safe Fiberoptic Endotracheal Intubation
Saksham Gupta, Sarthak Mishra, Arshad Ayub, Kamran Farooque, Spandan Roy and Babita Gupta.
Accepted for publication at IEEE TAROS 2026, Provisional Patent Number: 202311072640
Paper / Video / Website
This paper presents BRIS, a human-in-the-loop robotic platform designed to assist fiberoptic-guided endotracheal intubation with learning-enabled control for safe clinical deployment.

Experience

Robotics Research Center — IIIT Hyderabad
Master's Student and RA (2023 – Present)
Work on robotic arms, quadcopters, ground robots, aerial grasping, and medical robotic systems.
AIIMS – ICMR
Research Associate (2021 – 2024)
Developed control systems and AI tools for robotic medical procedures.
Team Darvin — Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition - Oakland University Detroit
Team Captain (2021 – 2023)
Achieved 3rd and 7th place internationally.
MPSTME Racing Team
Core Member of Data Aquisition and Electronics Dept (2018 – 2019)
Built a custom dashboard with GPS for data logging and displaying for an rugged All Terain Vehicle for the Baja competition.
Last updated: Mar 2026