Abhirama Sonny

FIRST Tech Challenge (FTC) is a robotics competition where high school students design, build, and program robots to compete in games involving challenges like scoring points and navigating obstacles. As a programmer on Team 7172 Technical Difficulties, a 13+ year private team from Plano, Texas, I develop software for robot control in autonomous and teleoperated modes to achieve competitive success.

• Ranked 3rd on the FTC Hall of Fame, MTI '25, and World Championships '25, demonstrating exceptional performance in competitive robotics.
• Developed software for LimeLight 3A utilizing Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect game elements, enabling autonomous robot navigation.
• 7x North Texas Winning Alliance Captain, and Worlds Connect Award 1st place '25', leading the team to multiple victories.

Co-founded a private highschool VEX v5 robotics team, Team 14142A Axiom from the organization IrrationalRobotics. VEX Robotics is a competition where high school students design, build, and program robots to compete in games involving challenges like scoring points and navigating obstacles. As the lead programmer, I developed the robot's control software using Pros CLI in C++.

• Designed a modular state-machine control framework, reducing subsystem integration time and improving reliability during matches.
• Wrote a custom pure pursuit path-following algorithm for differential drivetrain robots with adaptive lookahead and curvature-based feedforward, achieving median path tracking error < 2cm in tests.
• Built a cross-platform path-planning and waypoint editor that exports trajectories to the robot and to a simulator for closed-loop verification; included velocity profiling and obstacle heuristics for real-world robustness.

Building a startup that adds an AI agent to your iMessage group chats. Core functionality includes web integration with online vendors to facilitate easy ordering, smart scheduling with Google Calendar, and smart summaries, among other features. Used Heroku, OpenRouter, and PostgreSQL.

• Developed an agent for iMessage groups, enabling seamless integration with external APIs for real-time data retrieval and user interactions.
• Implemented custom web scraping & web interactions with vendors to automate product ordering, reducing manual effort and improving user convenience in group chats.
• Integrated Google Calendar API for intelligent event scheduling, allowing the AI to propose and book meetings based on group availability.

Wetlab Research on endophytes under the guidance of Dr. S. Umesha, Department of Biotechnology. Worked on the preparation of Nutrient Agar, Potato Dextrose Agar, and isolating endophytes from plants.

• Isolated viable endophytic fungi from healthy leaves of Ocimum sanctum and Leucas aspera using surface sterilization and plating on Potato Dextrose Agar, documenting reproducible colony emergence within five days.
• Identified and characterized nine distinct morphotypes based on macroscopic morphologies and growth behavior, consistent with genera such as Aspergillus, Cladosporium, Fusarium, and Diaporthe/Phomopsis, while recording host incidences.
• Prepared clean subcultures for downstream molecular identification and bioactivity screening, establishing a sterile workflow that aligns with published research on endophyte diversity in Lamiaceae herbs.

Conducted advanced research on cell signatures in autoimmune conditions, focusing on Myocarditis, under the mentorship of Dr. Jodi Kraus at the Cambridge Centre for International Research. The project involved developing and testing methodologies to differentiate myocarditis-affected cells from healthy controls, utilizing wet-lab & computation techniques to enhance diagnostic accuracy.

• Developed a novel assay for identifying myocarditis-specific cell signatures, achieving approximately 95% accuracy in distinguishing affected cells from controls.
• Collaborated on data interpretation and statistical modeling to correlate cellular biomarkers with disease progression, contributing to potential advancements in autoimmune diagnostics.