Hello I am Tejo !

I’m a PhD student in Robotics at Georgia Tech, advised by Dr. Josiah Hester in the Ka Moamoa lab.

Imagine a robot you could leave out in the world for years: one that runs on the energy it harvests, notices when part of it is damaged, and keeps working instead of ending up in a landfill. Today’s robots are far from that. My research works toward it by combining soft actuators, low-power embedded hardware, and data-driven sensing and control.

In our ICRA 2026 paper, we showed that a single motion sensor is enough to detect a puncture in a pneumatic soft actuator, find the damaged chamber, and recover its actuation force. I’ve also built a battery-free drone (finalist, Georgia Tech SustainX 2024) and contributed to bioinspired camouflage fibers that adapt their color using computer vision (ACS Nano 2025).

Before my PhD, I earned an M.S. in Robotics at Georgia Tech, advised by Dr. Nader Sadegh. Before that, I completed my bachelor’s in Mechanical Engineering with a specialization in Mechatronics at Walchand College of Engineering, Sangli, graduating with a silver medal, where I built vision-based systems for robotic grasping and object tracking.