CV
Curriculum vitae for Varun Rayamajhi, an undergraduate robotics researcher working on multi-agent systems, reinforcement learning, and safety-critical control.
Contact Information
| Name | Varun Rayamajhi |
| Professional Title | Undergraduate Student |
| varun [dot] rayamajhi [at] richmond [dot] edu |
Professional Summary
Undergraduate researcher interested in multi-agent robotics, reinforcement learning, and safety-critical control.
Experience
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2026 - Present Pittsburgh, PA, USA
Undergraduate Research Fellow
Carnegie Mellon University, Robotics Institute
Advisor: Prof. Katia Sycara, Advanced Agent-Robotics Technology Lab
- Developing safe hierarchical multi-agent reinforcement learning methods for persistent environmental sensing in the presence of spatiotemporal risks such as fire and smoke.
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2025 - Present Richmond, VA, USA
Undergraduate Researcher
University of Richmond, Robotics Lab
Advisor: Dr. Patrick Martin
- Investigating whether evolving Adaptive Control Barrier Function penalty variables can forecast rising safety stress before a robot reaches a safety-critical state.
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2025 - 2025 Chicago, IL, USA
Research Software Engineering Intern
University of Chicago, Data Science Institute Summer Lab
Advisor: Dr. Pedro Lopes, Human-Computer Integration Lab
- Developed the first interactive mobile application for systematic digital measurement of downgaze palsy in Progressive Supranuclear Palsy assessment.
- Reduced evaluation time by 80% compared with the traditional manual workflow in the project study.
- Developed a three-stage computer-vision pipeline for automating downgaze palsy assessment by combining image processing, machine-learning techniques, and geometric analysis.
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2025 - 2025 Richmond, VA, USA
Machine Learning Research Assistant
University of Richmond, Department of Physics
Advisor: Dr. Jack Singal
- Investigated Lagrangian and Hamiltonian Neural Networks for a dissipative mechanical system with explicit time dependence in its Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, and total energy.
- Built an end-to-end PyTorch pipeline for synthetic data generation, preprocessing, training, hyperparameter tuning, validation, and performance analysis.
- Presented the project at the Edinburgh x Anthropic AI Expo 2026 after selection as one of 25 projects from 70 submissions.
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2024 - 2024 Richmond, VA, USA
Undergraduate Robotics Researcher
University of Richmond, Robotics Lab
Advisor: Dr. Patrick Martin
- Developed a ROS 2 framework for decentralized multi-agent formation control and leader-follower coordination.
- Implemented action servers, clients, custom messages, and launch files for scalable agent deployment and communication.
- Validated the controllers in simulation and on a three-TurtleBot physical system.
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2026 - Present Richmond, VA, USA
Founder and President
Robotics Society, University of Richmond
- Establishing the university’s first Robotics Society to grow the robotics and engineering community.
- Designing workshops on Imitation Learning (Behavior Cloning and DAgger), Model Predictive Control, and PID control.
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2025 - 2026 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Reinforcement Learning Team Member
HumanEd, University of Edinburgh
- Completed reinforcement-learning training and developed robotic-control agents with Stable-Baselines3 and PyBullet.
- Contributed to an SO-100 robotic-arm project for real-world reinforcement-learning deployment.
Education
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2023 - 2027 Richmond, VA, USA
Bachelor of Science
University of Richmond
Computer Science
- Richmond Scholar and Robins Science Scholar.
- Dean’s List, all semesters.
- Coursework: artificial intelligence and machine learning in robotics, algorithms, data structures, software development, probability, linear algebra, multivariate calculus, classical mechanics, and mathematical methods in physics.
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2025 - 2026 Edinburgh, Scotland, UK
Full-year Visiting Student
University of Edinburgh
School of Informatics
- Coursework: Robot and Reinforcement Learning, Computer Vision, Accelerated Natural Language Processing, Control and Instrumentation Engineering, Sensor Networks and Data Analysis, Human-Computer Interaction, and Computer Security.
Publications
Projects
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From Dynamic Programming to Reinforcement Learning
- Compared dynamic programming, MPC, iLQR, and tabular Q-learning for stabilization, disturbance recovery, computational efficiency, and model mismatch.
- Studied value-function discretization, MPC horizon selection, Q-learning schedules, and pole-length generalization.
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On-Policy vs. Off-Policy Deep Reinforcement Learning
- Compared PPO and SAC on MuJoCo locomotion and robotic-manipulation tasks.
- Evaluated sample efficiency, stability, hyperparameter sensitivity, final policy quality, and practical compute cost.
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Tissue Segmentation and Nuclei Classification
- Developed U-Net-based tissue segmentation models for class-imbalanced melanoma histopathology images, comparing end-to-end training with autoencoder pre-training.
- Built an EfficientNet-B0 nuclei classifier and evaluated ImageNet initialization, SimCLR, and supervised contrastive pre-training.
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Cartpole Trajectory Tracking with Model Predictive Control
- Designed an MPC controller for breathing sine-wave trajectory tracking while maintaining pole stability.
- Completed more than 200 tuning iterations and achieved position RMSE of approximately 0.024 m in the low-frequency experiment.
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Transformer-Based German-English Neural Machine Translation
- Trained an encoder-decoder Transformer and analyzed generalization to longer out-of-distribution sentences.
- Performed manual error analysis, attention-coverage analysis, BLEU and ChrF evaluation, and decoding-strategy optimization.
Honors and Awards
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2023 Richmond Scholar
University of Richmond
One of 25 students selected from more than 11,000 applicants.
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2024 Robins Science Scholar
University of Richmond
Merit-based award given to fewer than 3% of each class.
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2026 Robert E. Loving Book Award
University of Richmond
Awarded to juniors with the top GPA in their class.
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2024, 2025 University of Richmond Summer Fellowship
University of Richmond
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2023 Dean's List
University of Richmond
Awarded every semester.