Sriyash Poddar

Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Sriyash Poddar is a leading researcher in robot navigation within crowded, dynamic human environments, with a primary focus on the intersection of crowd motion prediction and safe, socially-aware robot control. His work addresses a critical challenge in robotics: enabling autonomous systems to move efficiently and comfortably through dense crowds without compromising human safety. Poddar’s key contributions include the development of novel topological approaches to navigation, as demonstrated in his highly cited paper “Winding Through: Crowd Navigation via Topological Invariance” (30 citations), which leverages topological invariants to robustly plan paths through complex, interacting crowds. He further advanced the field with “From Crowd Motion Prediction to Robot Navigation in Crowds” (29 citations), a seminal work that bridges the gap between high-fidelity multiagent prediction models and practical, real-time navigation policies. Together, these papers have garnered nearly 60 citations, highlighting their influence on both theoretical and applied robotics. Poddar’s research is distinguished by its rigorous treatment of the high-dimensional, interaction-rich nature of human crowds, offering principled solutions that move beyond end-to-end black-box methods. His work is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of autonomous navigation in human-centric spaces.