Ishayu S. Shikhare

Hi, I’m Ishayu Shikhare!

I’m interested in safe autonomous robots and policies that work in complex, rich scenarios whether that means racing autonomously, walking robustly, or inspecting parts on a factory floor.

I’m currently at The AirLab, building uncertainty and semantics-aware navigation for quadrotors in firefighting domains. I also lead the RL team at Carnegie Mellon Racing (CMR), where we’re developing a DRL controller and Real2Sim2Real dynamics module for our Formula SAE driverless car. I previously worked in the BioRobotics Lab on bio-inspired neural locomotion (ICRA 2025) and interned at Siemens, where I architected a visual inspection pipeline for industrial edge deployment. Outside the lab, I’ve developed adaptive robust RL methods and built RoboDSL, an open-source DSL that unifies ROS2, CUDA, and ONNX for robotics.

When I’m not working, I enjoy film, cooking, and mountain biking.