Subhadeep Koley

I'm a Computer Science PhD student at Lehigh University, advised by Prof. David SaldaƱa in the Swarms Lab.

I am interested in how aerial robots can share information to navigate turbulent airflow, and in model-based reinforcement learning for complex physical interactions. Before Lehigh, I built decentralized drone-swarm software deployed on a five-drone swarm at IIT Kanpur.

I'm looking for research internships for Summer 2027 in aerial robotics, multi-robot systems, and robot learning.

Photo of Subhadeep Koley

Selected publications

Full list on Google Scholar.

ViPER pursuit-evasion demo
ViPER: Visibility-based Pursuit-Evasion via Reinforcement Learning

Yizhuo Wang, Yuhong Cao, Jimmy Chiun, Subhadeep Koley, Mandy Pham, Guillaume Adrien Sartoretti

Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2024

paper / project page / code

A learned policy lets a team of robots coordinate to find and track evaders in unknown environments.

Battery thermal runaway experiment
Early Detection of Thermal Runaway of Lithium-ion Battery: An Experimental Study

Ajit Das, Saumendra Nath Mishra, Subhadeep Koley, Sourav Sarkar, Achintya Mukhopadhyay, Swarnendu Sen

IEEE Conference on Sustainable Energy and Future Electric Transportation (SEFET), 2023

Best Paper Award

paper / award

News

Oct 2026 Presenting HintBlimp, our work on physical human-robot interaction with blimps, at the Workshop on Nonverbal Cues for Human-Robot Cooperative Intelligence at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh.
Sep 2026 Started exploring collaborative aerial navigation in turbulent flows.
May 2025 Attended ICRA 2025 in Atlanta and presented a live demonstration of MochiSwarm, our lab's open-source testbed of lightweight robotic blimps that operate as a swarm without external localization.
Nov 2024 Our SwarmsLab team won first place at the Defend the Republic (DTR) drone competition at Indiana University, competing against teams including Georgia Tech, Michigan, and Arizona State.
Nov 2024 ViPER presented at CoRL 2024 in Munich.
Aug 2024 Started my PhD at Lehigh University with Prof. David SaldaƱa.
Aug 2023 Won the Best Paper Award at IEEE SEFET for work on early detection of battery thermal runaway.