I am a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, where I primarily work with Professor Anirudha Majumdar and the Intelligent Robot Motion Lab (IRoM). I work on automated testing and policy evaluation of autonomous robotic systems. My research uses tools from systems and theory, applied statistics, formal methods, and optimization.

I completed my Ph.D. in Control and Dynamical Systems in June 2024 from the California Institute of Technology, where I was advised by Professor Richard M. Murray. My dissertation research focused on using formal methods for Test and Evaluation (T&E) of autonomous robotic systems.

Before Caltech, I earned my Bachelors degree in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities in 2018. As an undergraduate, I was fortunate to start my research journey with Professors Peter Seiler, Neera Jain, Austin Nash, Ufuk Topcu, and Dr. Ivan Papusha.

I also spent the summer of 2021 at Motional as an Autonomy Research intern in the Behavior Prediction and Planning Group under the supervision of Dr. Eric Wolff and Dr. Tung Phan-Minh. At Motional, I worked on Counter-example Guided Repair of Learning-based Planners using Optimization and Bayesian inference techniques.

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CV, Google Scholar, LinkedIn, Github, Email: ab5832@princeton.edu

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Talks

• Nov 2023: Toyota Motor North America R&D. Toyota Research Institute, North America (TRINA). Virtual Seminar.
• Nov 2023: Autonomous Systems Lab, Stanford University, Nov 2023. Thanks to the ASL Lab and Professor Marco Pavone for hosting me!
• Nov 2023: ECE Department Seminar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
• Nov 2023: Intelligent Robot Motion Lab (IRoM), Princeton University. I had a wonderful time visiting Princeton and meeting students at the IRoM Lab. Thanks to Professor Ani Majumdar for hosting me!
• Oct 2023: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I had a great time meeting fellow PhD students and visiting the University of Michigan! Thanks to Professors Necmiye Ozay and Pete Seiler for hosting me.
• Oct 2023: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
• June 2023: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
• May 2023: CPS-IoT Week The International Workshop on Perception for Safety-Critical Cyber-Physical Systems
• Dec 2022: National Institute of Informatics (NII), Tokyo. Thanks to Ichiro Hasuo for inviting me!
• Oct 2022: 40th SoCal Controls Workshop
• Oct 2022: US-Japan Seminar on AI, Autonomy, Robotics, and Informatics
• Jun 2022: Robotics: Science and Systems Workshop on Infrastructure for Test and Evaluation
• May 2022: NASA Formal Methods Symposium
• Mar 2022: VehiCAL Group Meeting Talk, UC Berkeley
• Dec 2021: Conference on Decision and Control
• Sept. 2021: Research Seminar, Motional
• Nov. 2020: VehiCAL Group Meeting Talk, UC Berkeley

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Preprints

Pacti: Scaling Assume-Guarantee Reasoning for System Analysis and Design
Inigo Incer, Apurva Badithela, Josefine Graebener, Piergiuseppe Mallozzi, Ayush Pandey, Sheng-Jung Yu, Albert Beneveniste, Benoit Caillud, Richard M. Murray, Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli, and Sanjit Seshia
Submitted to ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS)
[preprint, tool]

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Publications

Evaluation Metrics of Object Detection for Quantitative System-Level Analysis of Autonomous Systems
Apurva Badithela, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn, Richard M. Murray
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023
[paper]

Reasoning over Test Specifications using Assume-Guarantee Contracts
Apurva Badithela*, Josefine B. Graebener*, Inigo Incer*, and Richard M. Murray
Proceedings of the 15th NASA Formal Methods (NFM), 2023, pp 278-294.
[paper]

Synthesizing Reactive Test Environments for Autonomous Systems: Testing Reach-Avoid Specifications with Multi-Commodity Flows
Apurva Badithela*, Josefine B. Graebener*, Wyatt Ubellacker, Eric V. Mazumdar, Aaron D. Ames, Richard M. Murray
IEEE International Conference Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023
[paper, code]

Towards Better Test Coverage: Merging Unit Tests for Autonomous Systems
Josefine B. Graebener*, Apurva Badithela*, and Richard M. Murray
Proceedings of the 14th NASA Formal Methods (NFM), 2022, pp 133-155.
[paper, code]

Leveraging Classification Metrics for Quantitative System-level Analysis of Temporal Logic Specifications
Apurva Badithela, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn, and Richard M. Murray
60th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, 2021
[paper, code]

Analysis of the Heavy-ball Algorithm using Integral Quadratic Constraints
Apurva Badithela and Peter J. Seiler
American Control Conference, 2019
[paper]

Dynamic Modeling of a Sensible Thermal Energy Storage Tank with an Immersed Coil Heat Exchanger under Three Operation Modes
Austin Nash, Apurva Badithela, and Neera Jain
Journal of Applied Energy, 2017
[paper]

Workshop Papers

Minimally Constrained Testing for Autonomy with Temporal Logic Specifications
Apurva Badithela*, Josefine Graebener*, and Richard M. Murray
Workshop on Envisioning an Infrastructure for Multi-Robot and Collaborative Autonomy Testing and Evaluation
Robotics: Science and Systems (R:SS), 2022
[paper]

*: Equal authorship.