People

Dr. Sriramya Bhamidipati is a Robotics Technologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, where she develops novel autonomous navigation algorithms for terrestrial and space robotic systems. Before joining JPL, Dr. Bhamidipati worked as a postdoctoral scholar in the Navigation and Autonomous Vehicles (NAV) lab at Stanford University, where she specialized in designing distributed lunar surface networks and lunar communication and navigation satellite systems. Dr. Bhamidipati received her Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering in 2021 from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, where she also received her M.S. in Aerospace Engineering in 2017. Her graduate research focused on risk-aware positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) for multi-sensor and multi-agent platforms. She earned her B.Tech in Aerospace Engineering and minors in Systems and Controls Engineering in 2015 from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, India, where she also worked on the institute’s student satellite project Pratham, which successfully launched in 2016.

At JPL, Dr. Bhamidipati worked as a certified pilot in the Guidance, Navigation, and Control (GNC) system for NASA’s Mars Ingenuity Helicopter, where she performed flight planning, uplink and downlink operations for more than 35 flights on Mars. She also worked on the leader election module and multi-agent autonomy development for NASA's lunar technology demonstration, Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE). She has extensive experience working on navigation techniques for various research projects involving lunar rovers, maritime vessels, and satellite constellations around the Moon and Mars.

Dr. Bhamidipati's research interests include PNT, robot autonomy, and multi-agent systems with applications in satellites, surface robots and aerial vehicles. She has published more than 40 papers in journals and peer-reviewed conferences. She received Best Paper award in IEEE ICC in 2019 and Best Presentation of the session award four times at the ION GNSS+ conferences. She also received the Amelia Earhart Fellowship by Zonta International Foundation in 2020.