Neel Jawale

Neel Jawale is a robotics and ML software engineer at NVIDIA. His work focuses on algorithms that enable robots with diverse embodiments to plan and navigate unstructured, dynamic environments with smooth, reliable behavior. He approaches this by combining reinforcement learning (RL) with model-based optimization, leveraging the strengths of both paradigms. Before NVIDIA, he completed a master’s degree at the University of Washington, Seattle, where he researched methods that couple offline RL with Model-Predictive Control (MPC) for rapid skill acquisition, and worked on slip-aware robotic manipulation using optical tactile sensing.