Jishnu Jaykumar Padalunkal
Research: Learning from humans and few examples for embodied robotics
I’m a fourth-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.
🎓 I’m graduating in 2027 and looking for full-time research scientist positions in industry.
I work on making robots learn from minimal supervision — either few-shot examples (a few photos of an object) or input from humans (one demonstration video, a few iterations of guidance/correction). The work runs on real hardware, not just in simulation. My PhD thesis brings four such projects together: FewSOL (ICRA 2023), a few-shot object dataset; Proto-CLIP (IROS 2024), vision-language few-shot perception; iTeach (under submission), learning from human interaction and guidance; and HRT1 (under submission), mobile manipulation from a single human video.
Looking for students: I’m always looking for motivated MS and undergraduate students to supervise on robot learning research at the intersection of vision, language, and robotics. If you have strong coding skills and are interested in research, please reach out via email.
news
| May 7, 2026 | Spotted in UTD Jonsson’s ECS AI Days 2026 recap — where we demoed HRT1 🎉  |
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| May 1, 2026 | Won the Best Poster Award 🏆 for HRT1 at AI Days 2026. |
| Apr 22, 2026 | UOIS Toolkit has been released! 🌟 |
| Apr 3, 2026 | Presented HRT1 at TEROS 2026 held at UT Arlington. |
| Apr 2, 2026 | Honored to receive the Louis Beecherl Jr. Graduate Fellowship for the 2026-2027 academic year at the University of Texas at Dallas. |