About

I'm Anshuman Barnwal, an electrical engineer drawn to systems and control.

This site does two things. The blog is where I write about control theory, robotics and history. This page is a memory lane: a record of how I got here, kept so I can look back on it and share it with others.

You can reach me at b.anshuman1305@gmail.com or find my work on GitHub.

Ranchi

I was born and brought up in Ranchi, India. My childhood went into fiction books by Roald Dahl, Enid Blyton and first person shooter games. A refrigerator carton served as my tree house, and I'd stay in it with a blanket and a torch, reading for unhealthy spans of time. Behind our house stood a tall moringa tree, and I spent a lot of time in its branches watching the street. Below the tree was also my grandfather's electrical shop which he worked on during his retirement, where I also spent many evenings.

The last three years of schooling were different, detached and focused, working towards the engineering entrance exam with my friends. Those were productive days, when I cut my hair to save time.

IIT Kanpur, 2020–2024

I pursued bachelor's in electrical engineering at IIT Kanpur, India.

2021

• Joined the Aerial Robotics team, which became the thread running through my time there. I wrote about it in Learning to Fly at IIT Kanpur.
• Received the Academic Excellence Award for the 2020–21 academic year.
• Spent the summer on Game of Blocks, learning about blockchains (which was the hype then), some game theory and smart contracts.

2022

• Inter IIT Tech Meet 10.0. With five other sophomores, I built JuX, a Python package that identifies and classifies solar bursts in X-ray light curves for an ISRO problem statement. It won a bronze medal, and also gave me a taste of staying up until 4 a.m.
• Teaching. I ran HackIT, a summer cybersecurity project, for about 25 first-year students. Around eight stayed until the end, and I learnt how much harder teaching is than it looks.
• Bird song. A summer project on few-shot bio-acoustic detection fell short of its goal, but it led directly to a paper. We used an accelerometer during training to get better detection from a microphone alone, raising the F1 score from 76% to 83%. I was second author, and the paper was accepted at IEEE ICASSP 2023.
• Takneek. I co-led a problem statement in the inter-hall technical contest, simulating an artificial society and watching what happened when we introduced ideas like religion and competing economic systems. It demonstrated how simple rules produce unexpected complexity.

2023

• Inter IIT Tech Meet 11.0. I led a team of ten on a drone swarm control challenge, which won a bronze medal.
• Logic locking. With Prof. Shubham Sahay, I designed a logic-locking scheme for a logic-in-memory 3D NAND flash architecture. It needs no additional hardware in the memory, and its key space can in principle grow without bound.
• A processor from scratch. For a course with Prof. Urbi Chatterjee, I built a single-cycle 32-bit MIPS processor in Verilog, along with an assembler for it, as part of my goal of understanding computers from the bottom up.
• Goldman Sachs. I spent the summer as a software engineering intern, building a data pipeline for correlations between stocks and their proxies across global exchanges. The technical work felt comfortable. The people were what made it new, and it was a formative two months.

ETH Zürich, 2024–

2024

• I moved to Switzerland for an M.Sc. in Electrical Engineering and Information Technology at ETH Zürich, specializing in systems and control.
• In November 2024 I joined aCentauri Solar Racing to help build a solar car. My part covered the steering electronics, from the PCB to FreeRTOS firmware, and the car's wireless telemetry.

2025

• Minimum Violation Planning. I worked under the supervision of Matteo Penlington in IDSC Frazzoli, implementing a trajectory optimization problem in Python-JaX for systems with dynamics like the kinematic bicycle model. Trajectories were generated using Dubin curves, their costs calculated using Linear Temporal Logic and global trajectory selection using method analogous to RRT*.
• SpiNaCH. I worked as a research assistant under Peter Scharfe and Jerome Roland, with designing a board that would be capable of sampling ${}6 \times 8{}$ Hall Effect Sensors. This further put me in Altium and STM environment, as well as specifically how ADCs work.
• ABB. In the supervision of Ioannis Tsoumas and Prem Pandiarajan, I worked with ABB Baden Control Core team on the ACS5000 drive. I learnt about presenting work in front of people, documenting in maintainable manner, and brainstorming together over feasibility and commercial concerns. The technical work was in CasAdi, MATLAB and Simulink, and C++ intra-firm framework, the most emphasis on which was given over writing nearly no comments. Letting the action explain itself.

2026

• Obstacle Avoidance. The fourth semester of my masters revolved around lyapunov theory, but the semester project was a highlight which I did with Paula Stocco and Han Wang in iFA and Professor Lars Lindemann. The high geometrical approach of controls taken in LASA, EPFL and mainly the work of Lukas Huber was the center of attention, and how obstacle avoidance was approached.
• RockETH. Working as research assistant under Andrea Carron and Professor Melanie Zeilinger, we are designing the platform of a rocket-like drone from its firmware (a forked betaflight) to a controls and robotics software (CRS) platform to develop guidance and navigation control algorithms.

Away from the desk

I'm a good clay sculptor, I like cooking and ice skating, and I love table tennis and meeting people.