ABOUT ME

Most control theory assumes the robot is alone. My work begins at the moment it isn't.

I'm Chayan Kumar Paul, a Research Associate at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore. I completed my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering at IIT Delhi in 2026 as a Prime Minister's Research Fellow, supervised by Prof. Indra Narayan Kar, after a B.Tech. from IIEST Shibpur.

I build controllers for robots that make contact with a workpiece, like a wall, or a person's hand. Contact is where most guarantees quietly stop applying: the model is wrong, the environment is unmeasured, and the thing you've collided with may be someone. My work is about keeping the promises anyway. That means adaptation with a deadline, precisely  fixed-time estimators whose convergence is bounded before you know where the system started; parameters that converge from recorded data rather than from an excitation condition no safe robot ever satisfies; safety enforced by construction rather than by tuning; and observers that recover the interaction force from proprioception alone, giving a robot a sense of touch it has no sensor for.

At IISc I'm working on whole-body safety for manipulators — the guarantee that covers the elbow, not just the gripper — using funnel-based model-free control.

Away from the lab I hike, travel, and photograph. Mostly I like being somewhere I haven't modelled.