Pratik Ingle

Pratik Ingle

Pratik is a robotics researcher working on grasp-free manipulation: moving objects by shaping and controlling soft, modular surfaces instead of gripping them. He is a PhD candidate at the IT University of Copenhagen (REAL Lab) and is currently a visiting researcher at University College London working on tactile sensing and self-supervised learning.

Recent: Our paper on scalable, distributed control of a manipulation surface was accepted at SAB 2026, and two more (ICRA 2027 and an IJRR survey) are under review. Since March 2026 I have been a visiting researcher at UCL’s CRISP Lab working on tactile sensing and self-supervised learning. PhD defence expected October 2026.

Publications

Full list on Google Scholar and the research page.

Talks

  • RoboSoft 2026 - Scalable Surface-Based Manipulation Through Modularity and Inter-Module Object Transfer.
  • CASE 2025 - Heterogeneous object manipulation on nonlinear soft surface through linear controller.
  • RoboSoft 2025 - Soft Manipulation Surface With Reduced Actuator Density For Heterogeneous Object Manipulation.
  • EI 2025 - Harnessing Fabric Softness and Scalability for Object Manipulation.
  • ANTS 2024 - Moving Depot (MOD): An Efficient Depot Motion Strategy for Multi-Robot Foraging.

Research

I work on robotic manipulation surfaces: soft, fabric-based platforms driven by sparse actuators that move heterogeneous and fragile objects without grasping. Current threads:

  • Soft manipulation surfaces - reduced actuator density, geometric control, heterogeneous objects.
  • Modular manipulation - shared-boundary actuation and inter-module object transfer.
  • Tactile sensing - MAE/JEPA representation learning on normal and shear tactile channels, MuJoCo sensor simulation (UCL CRISP Lab).
  • Earlier: swarm robotics, multi-robot foraging, and collective decision-making.

Experience

  • REAL Lab, IT University of Copenhagen - PhD researcher, Oct 2023–present. Supervisors: Kasper Støy and Andrés Faíña.
  • CRISP Lab, University College London - Visiting researcher, Mar 2026–present. Host: Lorenzo Jamone.
  • Swarm Lab, NJIT and MOON Lab, IISER Bhopal - collective behaviour modelling, swarm robotics, UAVs (2020–2023).
  • IISER Bhopal - Integrated BS-MS, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, minor in Data Science, 2017–2023.

Selected Projects

See the full portfolio.

Writing

Recent posts from the blog.

Teaching and Service

  • Teaching assistant: Deep Learning, Intelligent Robotics, Computer Vision, Digital Image Processing and Bioimage Analysis (ITU).
  • Volunteer: ALIFE 2024, NeurIPS 2021.
  • Summer schools: IEEE RAS Multi-Robot Systems (2024), SCIoI/ISAB Embodied Intelligence (2023), COSMOS (2022), PRAIRIE/MIAI AI (2021).

Other