Zahir Mahammad

Masters in Robotics @UMD, College Park

Started as a car geek and evolved into a Robotics Engineer, with interests in AI, computer vision, robotic-control systems, mechanical design, and any engineering tech.
I see myself as a blend of computer, electronics, and mechanical Engineer. I enjoy writing clean, structured code —messy setups just don't sit right with me.

zahirmd@umd.edu    Github    Google Scholar    LinkedIn


Latest News

FEB 2025

Rebuttal for paper related to Transmission Line Inspection in RAL from RRC @IIIT Hyderabad, India

NOV 2024

Submitted paper related to Transmission Line Inspection in RAL from RRC @IIIT Hyderabad, India

NOV 2024

Attended ISRR 2024 conference at Los Angeles, United States

OCT 2024

Attended NVIDIA AI summit at Washington DC, United States

OCT 2024

PLANRL got accepted in ISRR 2024

AUG 2024

Submitted paper, PLANRL to ISRR 2024

AUG 2023

Excited to join as Masters Student in Robotics at University of Maryland, College Park, United States

DEC 2023

Excited for the Research internship at Robotics Research Center @IIIT Hyderabad, India

MAY 2022

Graduated with Mechanical Engineering Spec. with Smart Manufacturing from IIITDM Kancheepuram

MAR 2022

Placed as Senior Analyst at Capgemini, Bangalore, India


Education

University of Maryland, College Park

Master of Engineering - Robotics

Aug 2023 - May 2025

Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing, Kancheepuram

B.Tech - Mechanical Engineering Spec. with Smart Manufacturing

July 2018 - May 2022


Work Experience

RAAS Lab

Research Assitant - University of Maryland, College Park

Feb 2024 - Present

Worked with UR3e Robotic Arm, for IL and RL to perform long-horizon tasks;
Turtlebot Kuboki and low-cost-arm for interactive mobile manipulation integrated with language models.

Robotics Research Center

Research Intern - IIIT Hyderabad, India

Dec 2022 - July 2023

Worked in design and developement underactuated mechanism for aerial robots for Transmission Line Inspection


Publications


WireFlie: A Novel Obstacle-Overcoming Mechanism for Autonomous Transmission Line Inspection Drones

Sehgal Aditya, Zahiruddin Mahammad , Poorna Sasank, Ankur Badhwar, and Nagamanikandan Govindan
IEEE RA-L 2025
Webpage  •   Paper

Will be out soon (Ongoing Rebuttal & Final Revisions)

PLANRL: A Motion Planning and Imitation Learning Framework to Bootstrap Reinforcement Learning.

Bhaskar Amisha, Zahiruddin Mahammad , Sachin R. Jadhav, and Pratap Tokekar.
ISRR 2024
Webpage  •   Paper


Projects


Interactive Mobile Manipulator

RAAS Lab - Language Models

On-going

Built low cost arm, and mounted on a TurtleBot (Kobuki). Project involves integration with Language models for user interaction, enabling it to navigate to locations, identify, and deliver objects (π0), while interacting with humans and memorizing everything.

Boston CTO
Boston CTO

The left video displays the TurtleBot Kobuki robot with a pan-tilt camera joint. The middle video shows the custom manipulator picking up an object for deivery. The right video shows the (previous version) of manipulation integrated onto the mobilerobot. When given a goal object name, the TurtleBot navigates towards it using visual servoing.

RAG-Based local ChatBot

Multi-Modal Foundation Models
Presentation   •   Report   •   Video

This is a chatbot that can accurately answer questions from documents containing both text and images. It uses FAISS for vector-based text indexing, ColPali for image retrival, and Qwen-VL for visual understanding, with Mistral LLM for response generation. The dual-stream approach improves document understanding by extracting relevant information from both images and text

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