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Siddhant Tandon

Robotics Research Engineer

About Me

Hi! I am a robotics research engineer based out of Melbourne, Australia. I completed my university studies (an integrated Bachelors and Masters qualification) at Monash University last year. I have a diverse background, with experience ranging from human-computer interaction to robotics and applied research. I am looking for graduate study opportunities in 2025 which will allow me to harmonize these interests.

Experience

Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG)

Robotics Researcher

Working on cutting-edge robotics and AI research problems for the Australian Government. I joined as an intern, but was retained as a placement student, and subsequently on a scholarship as a part time employee till the start of 2024, when I joined fulltime. I was part of the team of 6 that won the Chief Defense Scientist's Science & Engineering Excellence Award in 2024 (selected out of an organization of 2000+ researchers).

Immersive Analytics Laboratory - Monash University

Research Assistant

Worked under Professor Timothy Dwyer and Dr Maxime Cordeil on tangible controllers for AR/VR. My work resulting in creation of the "Made-Axis", which was published at ACM ISS 2022. The paper can be found here. We won a best paper runner-up award!

Monash University - Monash High Powered Rocketry

Flight and Control Systems Engineer

I made rockets!

Education

Monash University Logo
2024

Master of Mechanical Engineering

Graduated with Distinction

Monash University Logo
2018 - 2023

Bachelor of Mechatronics and Robotics Engineering (Honours)

  • Completed the degree on a scholarship from the faculty, offering fee repayment for both my undergraduate and Masters degrees.
  • Completed a minor in materials science and engineering

Projects

The Made-Axis

A project I worked on while a part of the Immersive Analytics Laboratory at Monash University. The Made-Axis is a tangible, actuated controller for data visualisation and analysis, both on conventional 2D screens, and in AR/VR. I worked on the development of the devices by programming their firmware, as well as demo applications to showcase their capabilities.

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AR for Assisted Drone Landings

My honours thesis, focussed on using augmented reality to make a drone AI-copilot's actions more explainable. As part of this project, I developed an AR app (on HoloLens) to interface with the AI agent, and created a visualisation designed to communicate the agent's intent, certainity, and the control inputs it was producing. I also ran a user study to evaluated performance, which suggested AR was indeed efficacious in this context.

View Thesis

Making Airbrakes for a Rocket

A project from when I was a part of Monash High Powered Rocketry, creating actuatable airbrakes for a rocket to enable better control of the altitude reached by the system (a key metric for competition points allocation). In a team, I led avionics and airbrake actuation development, as well as dynamics analysis of the rocket (running CFD to simulate performance). We were also able to test the solution we engineered by launching a rocket with the payload.

View Project Report

A Locally Hosted LLM Chatbot for Apple Silicon

This project is a locally hosted chatbot using a Meta LLAMA 3.X model, and designed as a utility and as an educational experience, to learn more about how to interface with LLMs, tokenisation, context, paramters etc. as well as utilise Apple's new MLX framework. The UI features a minimalist Matrix-esque text entry and response interface (inspired by the "Hello Neo" scene from the first movie). Programmed in Python, utilising a Flask app to run the UI in a browser.

View Repo

Using EMG to Control a Video Game

In this project aimed to develop EMG control for video games, for amputees. The interface permits control of games like Flappy Bird and Pong. It entailed design of both the electrical circuit, as well as software. Key skills I exercised included:
- Circuit prototyping and contruction.
- Hardware filter design (we needed to create a band pass filter to isolate just muscle contraction signals).
- Programming (in MATLAB) to filter the signal further, and convert it into the inputs used to control the games.

View Report and Code

Skills

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