Naman Kumar

Naman Kumar

Robotics @ CMU

Hi! I'm Naman, a MS in Robotics student at CMU's Robotics Institute, advised by Prof. Katerina Fragkiadaki. I am currently working on embodied reasoning and memory for robotics.

Before CMU, I was a research assistant at IIIT-Hyderabad, where I worked on dense crowd navigation and trajectory optimization with Prof. K. Madhava Krishna. This led to a paper at ICRA 2025. I completed my B. Tech in Mechanical Engineering at NSUT, Delhi, where I also interned at TCS Research.

Publications

  1. 2025 ICRA 2025
    CrowdSurfer: Sampling Optimization Augmented with Vector-Quantized Variational AutoEncoder for Dense Crowd Navigation

    A VQ-VAE trajectory prior warm-starts a sampling optimizer for real-time navigation through dense crowds.

    Naman Kumar, Antareep Singha, Laksh Nanwani, Dhruv Potdar, Tarun R, Fatemeh Rastgar, Simon Idoko, Arun Kumar Singh, K. Madhava Krishna

    First page of CrowdSurfer: Sampling Optimization Augmented with Vector-Quantized Variational AutoEncoder for Dense Crowd Navigation arXiv
PGH
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Working on embodied reasoning and memory. In my free time, I play * and squash, and hop around .

* at the mercy of Pittsburgh weather

© 2026 — Naman Kumar