Arvind Ramanandan

Qualcomm (United Kingdom), Qualcomm (United States)

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Arvind Ramanandan is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of consumer electronics and autonomous aerial systems. His research has focused on harnessing the computational and sensing capabilities of everyday smartphones — including cameras, gyroscopes, and accelerometers — to enable affordable, high-performing aerial robots capable of operating in GPS-denied environments. Ramanandan's most influential contribution, "Smartphones power flying robots" (2015, 40 citations), demonstrated how the dramatic improvements in price-to-performance ratios of consumer-grade sensors could be leveraged for aerial robotics, fundamentally lowering the barrier to entry for sophisticated drone development. This work laid the groundwork for his subsequent research on swarm robotics, explored in "A swarm of flying smartphones" (2016, 20 citations), which extended these principles to coordinated multi-robot systems capable of autonomous deployment without GPS infrastructure. His later work on cooperative control and 3D reconstruction using smartphone-powered aerial robots further matured these ideas into practical, real-world applications. Collectively, Ramanandan's research has helped democratize aerial robotics by showing that cutting-edge autonomous systems need not rely on expensive, specialized hardware — a contribution with broad implications for surveillance, mapping, and disaster response.