I like making hardware that actually works.

I'm Koushik — robotics engineering student at the University of California, Riverside who'd rather be in a lab than a lecture hall. Most of what I actually know came from building things: hackathons, research, and robots that didn't always do what I wanted them to on the first try.

These days I'm split across 2 research labs. At the ARCS lab, with Mehrnoosh Ayazi, I'm working on soft pneumatic actuators for infant motor rehab — building assistive devices that have to be gentle enough to never hurt a baby. With Dr. Khoshnoud at Caltech, I'm on a team trying to get robots to communicate through quantum-encrypted links, which sounds insane until you're actually coding it and doing the math for it.

I started with combat robots in college. Nothing teaches you humility like watching something you spent months on get flipped in 30 seconds. I still carry that mindset — assume you're wrong, test early, and don't get too attached before it works.