Apurva Badithela

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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

  1. Beyond Binary Success: Sample-Efficient and Statistically Rigorous Robot Policy Comparison
    David Snyder, Apurva Badithela, Nikolai Matni, Anirudha Majumdar, Masha Itkina, Haruki Nishimura, George J. Pappas
    Under Review
  2. PlayWorld: Learning Robot World Models from Autonomous Play
    Tenny Yin, Zhiting Mei, Zhonghe Zheng, Miyu Yamane, David Wang, Jade Sceats, Samuel M Bateman, Lihan Zha, Apurva Badithela, Ola Shorinwa, Anirudha Majumdar
    Under Review
  3. Video Models in Robotics: Applications, Challenges, Future Directions
    Zhiting Mei*, Tenny Yin*, Ola Shorinwa*, Apurva Badithela, Zhonghe Zheng, Joseph Bruno, Madison Bland, Lihan Zha, Asher Hancock, Jaime Fernández Fisac, Philip Dames, Anirudha Majumdar
    Under Review
    [ preprint ]
  4. 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

  1. Reliable and Scalable Robot Policy Evaluation with Imperfect Simulators
    Apurva Badithela, David Snyder*, Lihan Zha*, Joseph Mikhail, Matthew O’Kelly†, Anushri Dixit†, Anirudha Majumdar
    Best Paper Award at CoRL 2025 Workshop on Eval&Deploy.
    Oral at SAFE-ROL: 2nd Workshop on Safe and Robust Robot Learning for Operation in the Real World at CoRL 2025.
    IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2026.
    [ preprint, project page ]
  2. 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, Haruki Nishimura
    Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS).
    [ paper, project page, code ]
  3. Task-Relevant Evaluation Metrics of Object Detection for Quantitative System-Level Analysis of Safety-Critical Autonomous Systems
    Apurva Badithela, Ranai Srivastav, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn, Richard M. Murray
    ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS), 2025.
  4. 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, Richard M. Murray
    IEEE Open Journal of Control Systems (OJ-CSYS), 2025.
    [ preprint, tool ]
  5. 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, Sanjit Seshia
    ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems (T-CPS).
    [ paper, tool ]
  6. 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 ]
  7. Reasoning over Test Specifications using Assume-Guarantee Contracts
    Apurva Badithela*, Josefine B. Graebener*, Inigo Incer*, Richard M. Murray
    NASA Formal Methods (NFM), 2023, pp. 278–294.
    [ paper ]
  8. 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 on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023.
    [ paper, code ]
  9. Towards Better Test Coverage: Merging Unit Tests for Autonomous Systems
    Josefine B. Graebener*, Apurva Badithela*, Richard M. Murray
    NASA Formal Methods (NFM), 2022, pp. 133–155.
    [ paper, code ]
  10. Leveraging Classification Metrics for Quantitative System-level Analysis of Temporal Logic Specifications
    Apurva Badithela, Tichakorn Wongpiromsarn, Richard M. Murray
    60th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 2021.
    [ paper, code ]
  11. Analysis of the Heavy-ball Algorithm using Integral Quadratic Constraints
    Apurva Badithela, Peter J. Seiler
    American Control Conference (ACC), 2019.
    [ paper ]
  12. Dynamic Modeling of a Sensible Thermal Energy Storage Tank with an Immersed Coil Heat Exchanger under Three Operation Modes
    Austin Nash, Apurva Badithela, Neera Jain
    Applied Energy, 2017.
    [ paper ]

Talks

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.