Apurva Badithela

I am a Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University, working on evaluation and testing of robot foundation models with Professor Anirudha Majumdar and the Intelligent Robot Motion Lab (IRoM). Broadly, I am interested in rigorous test and evaluation frameworks for robotics to build reliable, robust, and safe systems.

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. I received a Bachelors degree in Aerospace Engineering and Mechanics at the University of Minnesota, Twin-Cities in 2018.

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

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
Best Paper Award at CoRL 2025 Workshop on Eval&Deploy.
[preprint]

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]

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]

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
ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS), 2025

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
IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems (OJ-CSYS), 2025 [preprint, tool]]

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]

Talks

Oct 2025: Princeton PRPL Group Meeting Talk. Thanks to Tom Silver for hosting me!
Oct 2025: Amazon Robotics Science Chat. Thanks to Yesh Dattatreya and Farokh Atashzar for hosting me!
Oct 2025: Ames-Burdick Group Meeting Talk. Thanks to Professor Burdick and Ames for hosting me!
Oct 2025: USC Lira Lab Group Seminar. Thanks to Erdem Biyik for hosting me!
Oct 2025: UCLA Dixit Group Meeting Seminar. Thanks to Anushri Dixit for hosting me!
Oct 2025: Waymo Reading Group Seminar. Thanks to Matthew O’Kelly for hosting me!
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.
Nov 2023: ECE Department Seminar, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Nov 2023: Intelligent Robot Motion Lab (IRoM), Princeton University.
Oct 2023: University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
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

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.