Surgical & Humanoid Robotics

PRADEEP
SURYA DADI

I take robots from concept to contact — high-density PCBs and real-time firmware, perception and SLAM, simulation and precision control — and prove them on real hardware, from surgical manipulators to Boston Dynamics SPOT and the Unitree G1.

Built & deployed on
Boston Dynamics SPOT Unitree G1 Humanoid Franka Panda 7-DoF Tendon Manipulator Meta Quest 2 STM32 · Teensy · ESP32

How can machines
better assist the human body?

One question defines my work. It pulls me toward systems that demand extreme precision and extreme delicacy at the same time — where the machine has to meet the body on its own terms.

The Machine

Precision, modeled and proven

Sub-millimeter motion, observable and controllable. Non-linear dynamics, state-feedback control, and sensor fusion validated before a single part is printed.

  • Sub-mm precision
  • State feedback
  • Sensor fusion
  • Kinematics
  • Observers
The Body

Touch, tissue, and healing

Soft, adaptive structures and haptic feedback that let a robot interact with living tissue — giving surgeons a sense of touch and a steadier, gentler hand.

  • Haptics
  • Soft / origami
  • Bio-compatible
  • Tendon-driven
  • Recovery
Mission Log · A Robotics Journey

From a single PCB to surgical precision.

Five chapters — from a first production PCB, through research labs and a startup, to surgical-robotics research at Northeastern.

01
2022 · Maskottchen Technologies — Embedded Systems Intern

Respecting the hardware · First production-grade PCB

My start: production embedded systems. I designed motor-driver and mixed-signal PCBs in Altium and Eagle — H-bridges, gate drivers, OCP/SCP power distribution — and shipped firmware across ESP32, STM32, and Raspberry Pi with MQTT pipelines into the cloud. This is where I learned a breadboard is not a product.

Components −20% Power draw −15% Altium · STM32 · ESP32 · MQTT
02
2022 – 2023 · IIT Bombay · SARSTEM — Research Roots

Learning to do research · Aerial robotics & SLAM

At IIT Bombay's Aerial Robotics Lab I refined drone dynamics and implemented A*/RRT navigation in cluttered warehouses — earning a research reward. In parallel, a SLAM fellowship pushed adaptive Canny edge detection for low-light localization, which became my first IEEE paper and a 30% accuracy gain.

Edge accuracy +30% IIT Bombay Research Reward A* · RRT · SLAM · OpenCV
03
2022 – PRESENT · Stride N Style — Co-Founder & CTO

Research into a product · Smart-insole startup

I co-founded a smart-insole company around interchangeable health and acupuncture soles, raised ₹/$ seed funding from the Government of India, and drove the design through real user iterations — better durability, comfort, and cost. The TRISOLE energy-harvesting concept is filed as a patent.

Durability +35% Cost −20% $2K Govt-of-India seed · TRISOLE patent
04
2024 – 2026 · Northeastern University — MS Robotics

Real robots, real cities · SLAM on SPOT & gaze sensing

Boston threw me into autonomous research: Point-LIO SLAM with Velodyne + IMU + GPS fusion deployed on the NUANCE self-driving car and Boston Dynamics SPOT. In the AR/VR Lab I designed a capacitive eye-tracking front-end in Altium and wrote deterministic Teensy firmware — cutting device power by 80%.

Nav robustness +30% Device power −80% Point-LIO · EKF · MCL · Altium
05
CURRENT · Surgical Robotics Research NOW

Where the machine meets the body · Rolling-contact joints & surgical IK

My core research: rolling-contact joints with Kevlar-49 tendons that crush conventional revolute architectures, controlled by pole placement and a Luenberger observer (published, IEEE 2024). Alongside it, SE(3) inverse kinematics with remote-center-of-motion constraints in MuJoCo, and Quest-2 → Unitree G1 teleoperation — building toward foundation-model and VLA-driven manipulation.

Peak torque −73% Tracking error −64% Friction 20×↓ RCM-IK · MuJoCo · VLA · teleoperation
Selected Work

Systems built, modeled, and measured.

Hardware to perception to control — every project carried from a question to a number.

Surgical · Open SourceP / 02

Surgical Endoscope RCM-IK in MuJoCo

A custom SE(3) Newton-Raphson inverse-kinematics solver driving a 7-DoF Franka Panda endoscope, enforcing a remote-center-of-motion constraint so the tool pivots through a fixed trocar — the core requirement of minimally invasive surgery. Damped least-squares on the Lie group, with singularity handling and a full physics-validation pipeline.

SE(3) Lie-group IK RCM constraint Franka Panda
MuJoCoNewton-Raphson JacobianDamped least-squaresPython
View on GitHub
Humanoids · TeleoperationP / 03

Unitree G1 Teleoperation via Meta Quest 2

Bridging a $300 consumer VR headset to a $16K humanoid: real-time mapping of 6-DoF Quest controller poses to Unitree G1 joint configurations in MuJoCo, with feasibility constraints for stable contact-rich motion. Built as demonstration-data infrastructure for VLA and humanoid foundation-model training.

6-DoF pose mapping VLA data collection
Unitree G1Meta Quest 2MuJoCoWSL2Teleoperation
View on GitHub
Autonomy & SLAMP / 04

Point-LIO SLAM on SPOT & NUANCE

A robust localization stack deployed on two real platforms — the NUANCE self-driving car and Boston Dynamics SPOT. Point-LIO SLAM fuses Velodyne LiDAR with vision; an EKF blends IMU and GPS for drift-free trajectories; Monte-Carlo Localization holds up where features run thin. Full sensor calibration: camera-LiDAR extrinsics, IMU bias, magnetometer hard/soft-iron correction.

Nav robustness +30% Yaw accuracy +25% Loop closure +20%
Boston Dynamics SPOTPoint-LIOEKFMCLROS2Velodyne
View the work
Control & SimulationP / 05

Tendon-Driven Manipulator Control + GUI

A linearized continuous-time model with full controllability and observability, driven by pole-placement state feedback and a Luenberger observer — visualized through a MATLAB GUI that compares joint architectures in real time under tissue-contact disturbance, with Kevlar-49 vs Nylon-66 material analysis.

Peak torque −73% Tracking error −64% Settle <0.5s
Pole placementLuenberger observerMATLABMaterial analysis
View the work
Surgical Vision · Open SourceP / 06

Endoscopic Instrument & Tissue Tracking

Two perception pipelines for the surgical field: 6-DoF instrument pose tracking on the MICCAI EndoVis benchmark — handling occlusion, specular reflection, and texture-poor surfaces — and a Farneback dense-optical-flow tracker that recovers cardiac cycle and heart rate from monocular endoscopic video. The vision backbone for an autonomous, self-positioning endoscope.

6-DoF pose Dense optical flow
EndoVisFarnebackActive visionOpenCVMedical imaging
View on GitHub
Embedded & Mixed-SignalP / 07

Capacitive Gaze Sensing for AR Glasses

Research in Northeastern's AR/VR Lab: a mixed-signal Altium PCB for capacitive eye-tracking — transimpedance front-end, differential measurement, separated analog/digital grounds — paired with interrupt-driven C++ firmware on a Teensy (Cortex-M7) hitting a sub-millisecond deterministic control loop. Validated across 100+ HIL regression cycles.

Device power −80% Latency −15%
Altium mixed-signalTeensy / Cortex-M7I2C / SPIHIL testing
Interactive Lab

Don't just read it — run it.

Two live toys, built from my actual research. Drag them, break them, watch the algorithms fight back.

Probabilistic Robotics

Monte-Carlo Localization

A particle filter estimating a robot's pose from noisy range beacons — the localization core I ran on Boston Dynamics SPOT. Drag to drive the robot and watch the cloud collapse onto the truth. Hit Kidnap to teleport it and watch the filter recover.

Particles Est. error converging…
↳ drag on the map to drive
Mechanism Design

Rolling-Contact vs Revolute

My published result, made tactile. Flex the joint and compare a sliding revolute pivot against a rolling-contact joint — watch the contact sliding (the source of friction & wear) and the instantaneous center of rotation diverge.

Flex Revolute slip 0.0 RCJ slip 0.0

Pure vanilla canvas — no engine, no dependencies. The same instinct I bring to embedded firmware: make it run anywhere, fast.

Research & Recognition

Published, cited, and patented.

Seven IEEE papers, three filed patents, and open-source code — research that leaves the lab.

0
IEEE Publications
0+
Citations
0
Patents Filed
h-0
h-index · Google Scholar

Selected Publications

  • Layout Optimization for Small-Scale Agrarian Industry IEEE ICOEI 2022 · 25 citations · computational geometry & constraint satisfaction
  • Improved Canny Edge Detection in Low-Light Conditions IEEE ICAIS 2023 · adaptive thresholding for low-light SLAM (+30% accuracy)
  • Exoskeleton Physiotherapy & Assistive Robotic Arm IEEE Sustainable Computing 2024 · rehabilitation exoskeleton with actuated arm
  • Piezoelectric Energy Harvesting in Automobile Wheels IEEE ICNWC 2024 · 5 citations · resonant-frequency-optimized harvesting
All 7 papers on Google Scholar

Patents

  • TRISOLE — Energy-Harvesting Smart Insole App. 202341079770 · Pending
  • IoT-Enabled Home-Automation PCB App. 202341079766 · Published
  • Dynamic Pressure-Induced Sprinkler System App. 202341061199 · Pending

Open-Source Robotics

Honors NTSE District Rank 1 · India IIT Bombay Research Reward Best Paper · Innotech Malaysia 2023 NCC Sergeant
Capabilities

A full-stack robotics toolkit.

Comfortable across the whole loop — sense, model, control, and build.

01 Perception & SLAM
Point-LIO SLAMOyster SLAMEKFMonte-Carlo LocalizationSensor fusionVelodyne LiDAROpenCVYOLO
02 Control & Estimation
State feedbackPole placementLuenberger observerImpedance / complianceMPC conceptsScrew theory · PoENon-linear dynamics
03 Simulation & Learning
MuJoCoIsaac SimGazeboSE(3) IK · RCMReinforcement learningPyTorchSim-to-realVLA / foundation models
04 Mechanisms & Surgical Robotics
Rolling-contact jointsTendon-driven actuationTeleoperationHapticsSoft / origamiOpenSim biomechanics3D printing
05 Embedded & Hardware
STM32 · Teensy · ESP32FreeRTOS · bare-metalEmbedded CAltium 4-layerMotor-driver PCBs48V/10A powerCAN · SPI · I2C
06 Languages, Tools & Platforms
PythonC / C++ (real-time)ROS / ROS2 · Nav2MoveIt2MATLABDockerLinux · Git · CMake
Results, in numbers
0%
Peak torque vs. revolute joints
0%
Mean tracking error
0×↓
Joint friction reduction
0%
Real-time detection accuracy
+0%
Navigation robustness
+0%
Loop-closure consistency
Let's build

Robots that help the human body.

MS Robotics, Northeastern University (April 2026) — open to surgical, humanoid, and autonomous robotics roles. STEM OPT authorized through May 2029, available globally. If you're building precision systems that meet the body, let's talk.

Email me GitHub LinkedIn Full portfolio
BostonTokyoDubaiAvailable worldwide