Jishnu Jaykumar Padalunkal

I’m a final-year PhD student at UT Dallas, working on robot learning with Yu Xiang at IRVL. I started as an MS student in Fall 2021 and switched to the PhD program after my first year. Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to receive the Jonsson School Graduate Study Scholarship (2021), the Louis Beecherl, Jr. Fellowship (2026), and the Dean of Graduate Education Dissertation Research Award (2026).

I work on making robots learn from minimal supervision — few-shot examples or input from humans. I build and test on physical robots and real-world scenes.

🎓 I’m graduating in 2027 and looking for full-time research scientist positions in industry. If my experience brings value to your team, please reach out!

My PhD thesis brings five projects together:

• FewSOL ICRA 2023 — few-shot object learning dataset
• Proto-CLIP IROS 2024 — vision-language few-shot perception
• iTeach (under submission) — learning from mistakes via human interaction and guidance
• HRT1 RA-L 2026 ICRA 2027 — training-free mobile manipulation from a single video
• RPX (under submission) — modular, foundation-model, and agentic robots all run on perception models; RPX gauges them in one unified benchmark across four real-world scenarios (clutter, interaction, clean, egocentric) captured with robot-grade cameras, so they’re chosen on evidence, not at random