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 robot policy evaluation. My research uses tools from applied statistics, control and systems theory, formal methods, and optimization.

I earned 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 completed 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.

---

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

---

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

---

Preprints

Reliable and Scalable Robot Policy Evaluation with Imperfect Simulators
Apurva Badithela, David Snyder*, Lihan Zha*, Joseph Mikhail, Matthew O’Kelly^†, Anushri Dixit^†, Anirudha Majumdar
In Preparation
[preprint (forthcoming)]

Guiding Data Collection via Factored Scaling Curves
Lihan Zha, Apurva Badithela, Michael Zhang, Justin Lidard, Jeremy Bao, Emily Zhou, David Snyder, Allen Z Ren, Dhruv Shah, Anirudha Majumdar
Under Review
[preprint, project page, code]

Task-Relevant Evaluation Metrics of Object Detection for Quantitative System-Level Analysis of Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems
Apurva Badithela, Ranai Srivastav, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn, and Richard M. Murray
Under Review

Flow-Based Synthesis of Reactive Tests for Discrete Decision-Making Systems with Temporal Logic Specifications
Josefine B. Graebener*, Apurva S. Badithela*, Denizalp Goktas, Wyatt Ubellacker, Eric V. Mazumdar, Aaron D. Ames, and Richard M. Murray
Under Review
[preprint, tool]]

---

Publications

Is Your Imitation Learning Policy Better than Mine? Policy Comparison with Near-Optimal Stopping
David Snyder, Asher J. Hancock, Apurva Badithela, Emma Dixon, Patrick Miller, Rares Andrei Ambrus, Anirudha Majumdar, Masha Itkina, and Haruki Nishimura
Robotics: Science and Systems
[paper, project page, code]

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
ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS)
[paper, tool]

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 contribution.