Samhita Marri

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Prof. Girish Chowdhary, where my research focus has been on developing learning-based systems and methods for autonomous plant manipulation that include harvesting, pruning, and health monitoring. I have also worked as a research intern at United Imaging Intelligence. Broadly, I am interested in developing autonomous systems that reduce repetitive and labor-intensive work across industries.

Before joining UIUC, I earned my master’s degree from Cornell University, where I worked with Prof. Joseph Skovira and Prof. Hadas Kress-Gazit. I also spent about a year as an intern at Xallent.

Outside of research, I enjoy Tae Kwon Do, crocheting, knitting, and hiking.

Google Scholar / Linkedin

Journal Publications

	HyReach: Vision-Guided Hybrid Manipulator Reaching in Unseen Cluttered Environments Shivani Kamtikar, Kendall Koe, Justin Wasserman, Samhita Marri, Benjamin Walt, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary Journal of Soft Robotics 2026 webpage / arXiv
	Learning-Based Position and Orientation Control of a Hybrid Rigid-Soft Arm Manipulator Kendall Koe, Samhita Marri, Benjamin Thomas Walt, Shivani Kamtikar, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary ASME Journal of Mechanisms and Robotics (JMR) 2025 webpage / paper / github
	Visual Servoing for Pose Control of Soft Continuum Arm in a Structured Environment Shivani Kamtikar, Samhita Marri, Benjamin Thomas Walt, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary IEEE RA-L & IEEE RoboSoft 2022 webpage / arXiv / github
	An Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) for concurrent measurements of solarinduced chlorophyll fluorescence and hyperspectral reflectance toward improving crop monitoring Christine Yao-Yun Chang, Ying Sun, Ruiqing Zhou, Oz Kira, Samhita Marri, Joseph Skovira, Lianhong Gu Journal of Agriculture and Forest Meteorology 2020 paper

Conference Publications

	Precision Harvesting in Cluttered Environments: Integrating End Effector Design with Dual Camera Perception Kendall Koe, Poojan Kalpeshbhai Shah, Benjamin Thomas Walt, Jordan Westphal, Samhita Marri, Shivani Kamtikar, James Seungbum Nam, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary ICRA 2025 webpage / arXiv
	Automated Synthesis of Modular Manipulators’ Structure and Control for Continuous Tasks around Obstacles Thais Campos de Almeida, Samhita Marri, Hadas Kress-Gazit RSS 2020 paper

Workshop

	PlantTrack: Task-Driven Plant Keypoint Tracking with Zero-Shot Sim2Real Transfer Samhita Marri, Arun Narenthiran Sivakumar, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Chowdhary RSS - Navigation & Mobile Manipulation in Challenging and Cluttered Natural Environments, 2024 Best Paper Award Finalist arXiv
	Gazebo Plants: Simulating Plant-Robot Interaction with Cosserat Rods Junchen Deng, Samhita Marri, Jonathan Klein, Wojtek Pałubicki, Sören Pirk, Girish Chowdhary, Dominik L Michels ICRA - Robotics and Sustainability, 2024 arXiv
	Visual Servoing for Pose Control of Hybrid Continuum Manipulator in an Unstructured Environment Shivani Kamtikar, Kendall Koe, Samhita Marri, Benjamin Thomas Walt, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary CoRL - L4SR, 2023 paper
	Towards Autonomous Berry Harvesting using Visual Servoing of Soft Continuum Arm Shivani Kamtikar, Samhita Marri, Benjamin Thomas Walt, Naveen Kumar Uppalapati, Girish Krishnan, Girish Chowdhary AAAI - AIAFS, 2022 paper

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