Saniya Patwardhan

Saniya is a Robotics Researcher at Imperial College London, working within the Robot Intelligence Lab at the Dyson School of Design Engineering. She's passionate about robot dexterity and intelligence, exploring how machines can not only "see" objects but also understand and interact with them, from delicate grips to precise movements. Her research sits at the intersection of robot perception and control, currently focused on human-robot collaboration for contact-rich tasks through Vision-Language-Action (VLA) based learning.

She recently presented her work, "Grasp Sequence Planning for Multi-object Grasping using Reachability Maps," at Advances in Robotics 2025 in Jodhpur, India, and is a part-time Robotics Intern at Netholabs in London. Saniya is also an Encord Ambassador.

Saniya holds an MRes in Robotics and AI from Imperial College London and a B.Tech in Mechanical Engineering with a Minor in Robotics from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar.