SARIKA RAMROOP

Software Engineer

Sarika received her MSc Advanced Controls and Systems Engineering from the University of Manchester, UK and her BSc Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of the West Indies (UWI). In both degrees, her research work focused on robotics, with her Masters thesis involving the simulation and analysis of emergent behaviours on multi-agent robot swarms. At Virtana she has had the opportunity to grow into a Technical Lead and manager role while working on projects involving robotics simulation and automation. Some of the projects she has worked on include investigating sensors for drone localization and using Unity3D, ROS and PyBullet for robotics-based simulations. Sarika hopes to continue furthering her expertise in the robotics field, particularly in the areas of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Outside of work, she is a passionate football fan and enjoys drawing in her spare time.

Past Projects:

  • Systems Integration

    • Deploying the ROS navigation stack on outdoor ground robots (2018)

    • Modeling 3D lidar coverage patterns and advising on robot sensor placement using the Gazebo simulation framework (2018, ROS, GazeboSim)

  • SW Infrastructure

    • Building a custom cross platform build pipeline to integrate the IKFast kinematics engine into a custom Unity3d robot simulator as a cross-platform C/C++ plugin. (2019)

    • Developing & managing the sw backend (internal interface design, external message definitions, middleware management, etc ) of a custom robot simulator (2021, Unity3d, C#)

    • Managed a 20+ engineer ‘technical debt’ reduction initiative, significantly increasing code quality and health (2022, Project Management).

  • Simulation

    • Oversaw the transition of 10+ real unique industrial robot arm workcells from real deployments into a custom Unity3d based robot simulation environment. (2020, Project Management, Unity3d, C#)

    • Creating a custom image segmentation tool for use with Unity (2020, Unity3D default render pipeline, Shaders/HLSL). 

    • Creating custom shaders for GPU-less depth and image rendering in Unity3D and executing performance benchmarking (2020, default render pipeline, Shaders/HLSL, XVFB, bash, Google Compute Engine)

    • Developing a scriptable frontend for a custom robot simulator (2021, Unity3d, C#, Python, Numpy)

  • DevOps

    • Deploying images on the cloud (Google Compute Engine) for remote simulation (2019, bash, server diagnostics, cron) 

  • Embedded SW

    • Rapid sensor prototyping with ultra-wideband sensors and ARM-based microcontrollers for unmanned aerial vehicles (2022, nRF-SDK, C)