Zahir Mahammad

Masters in Robotics @UMD, College Park

Started as a car geek and evolved into a Robotics Engineer

Interests: AI, Language Models, computer vision, control systems, motion planning, engineering design, and more (that I don't know).


I see myself as a blend of computer, electronics, and mechanical Engineer. I enjoy writing clean, structured code.


zahirmd@umd.edu    Github    G Scholar    LinkedIn    Twitter


Latest News

MAY 2025

Graduated🎓 with Masters in Robotics from University of Maryland, College Park

APR 2025

WireFlie: got Accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2025 🎉

NOV 2024

WireFlie: Submitted to 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

PLANRL: Submitted 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

Bachelor of 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

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

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 Robotics and Automation Letters 2025
Webpage  •   Paper

Autonomous Transmission Line Inspection System

Sketch-to-Skill: Bootstrapping Robot Learning with Human Drawn Trajectory Sketches

Peihong Yu, Amisha Bhaskar, Anukriti Singh, Zahiruddin Mahammad, Pratap Tokekar.
Robotics: Science and Systems - RSS 2025
Webpage  •   Paper

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

Bhaskar Amisha, Zahiruddin Mahammad , Sachin R. Jadhav, and Pratap Tokekar.
International Symposium for Robotics Research - (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 (Ï€0), while interacting with humans and memorizing everything.

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

View All