Sashenka GamageI am a senior undergraduate student at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (PolyU), studying Electronics Engineering. I conducted my undergraduate research at the RAIDS Lab supervised by Ir Dr Pai Zheng, where I focused on autonomous drone navigation and human-robot collaboration in smart manufacturing. My research projects include autonomous robotics, UAV navigation, and natural language processing for robot control. During my exchange semester at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I worked in the BADGER Lab, supervised by Dr. Peter Adamczyk. |  |
Research
I'm interested in autonomous robotics, UAV navigation, human-robot collaboration, and natural language processing for robot control. I am currently working on robot learning, including reinforcement learning and learning from demonstration for bi-manual manipulation tasks.
 | LLMs for Game Theory: Entropy-Guided In-Context Learning and Adaptive CoT Reasoning Tommaso Felice Banfi, Sashenka Gamage AAAI 2026 Bridge Workshop on Logical and Symbolic Reasoning in Language Models arXiv A novel framework integrating in-context learning with entropy-guided chain-of-thought reasoning for discrete, game-theoretic tasks and sequential decision-making. |
 | Autonomous Drone Navigation with Natural Language Processing for Human-Centric Smart Manufacturing Sashenka Gamage, Tian Wang, Ke Wan, Pai Zheng International Conference on Robotics and Computer Vision 2025 — IEEE Xplore IEEE Xplore LUNASM: an NLP-driven UAV navigation framework developed using ROS, Gazebo, analyzing human-robot interaction in smart manufacturing environments. |
 | Proactive Agentic Whiteboards: Enhancing Diagrammatic Learning Suveen Ellawela, Sashenka Gamage,Dinithi Dissanayake arXiv preprint arXiv DrawDash — an AI-powered whiteboard assistant with multimodal understanding, TAB-completion interaction, and speech-driven visual assistance. |
Presentations and Projects
 | Enhancing Human-Robot Collaboration in Smart Manufacturing: Autonomous Drone Navigation with NLP for Intuitive Control National Conference on Undergraduate Research (NCUR) 2025, Pittsburgh, PA |
 | Autonomous Navigation for Self-Balancing Robots UW-Madison Undergraduate Symposium 2025, Madison, WI code Using ROS2, Nav2, and a custom-built self-balancing robot with flat wheels. |
 | Intelligent UAV Systems for GNSS-based Remote Sensing on Vegetation Final Year Project, Interdepartmental Project code Primary object is to collect vegetation parameters by using GNSS remote sensing. Developing an autonomous navigation system for a UAV, by implementing coverage based path planning. |
Experience
 | RAIDS Lab, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 2023 – Present Undergraduate Researcher My research focus: Human-robot collaboration, autonomous drone navigation, NLP-driven UAV control. |
 | LifeSparrow Solutions Limited Summer 2025 Drone AI Engineer Things I did: Path planning with A-Star on Cesium 3D maps, Gemini Pro NLP integration, DJI Cloud Integration. |
 | CLP Power Hong Kong Summer 2024 Engineering Intern Things I did: Digital protection relay lifecycle analysis, 11kV station supply design review. |
 | The Hong Kong Polytechnic University Industrial Center 2023 – 2024 Robotics Research Assistant Things I did: MiR250 Robot training, Universal Robot programming, and worked on the CLP Generator Inspection Robot. |
Education
| The Hong Kong Polytechnic University 2022 – 2026 BEng (Hons) Electronics Engineering Top 5% of the Engineering Faculty, Fully Funded by the Belt and Road Scholarship. |
 | University of Wisconsin-Madison Spring 2025 Exchange Semester Courses: Introduction to Robotics, Database Management, State Space Systems, Digital Signal Processing. |
 | University of Cambridge Summer 2023 Summer Exchange Programme Courses: Nanotechnology, Jet Engines and Quantum Mechanics. Fully Funded by PolyU Global Engagement Office. |
Awards & Honors
| 2026 | NUS Young Fellowship — National University of Singapore |
| 2025 | Wong-Tit Shing Engineering Exchange Scholarship — Faculty of Engineering, PolyU |
| 2024 | Winner, HKEAS Global Grand Challengers Pitch Competition — HKEAS |
| 2024 | CLP Scholarship — CLP Power Hong Kong |
| 2024 | UN Millennium Fellow (Class of 2024) |
| 2024 | Hong Kong Techathon Merit Award (Open Group) |
| 2023 | HKSAR Government Scholarship Fund — Reaching Out Award |
| 2023 - 2025 | Dean's Honors List — PolyU |
| 2023 | Dr Winnie S M Tang-PolyU Student Innovation & Entrepreneurship Scholarship |
| 2023 | CURI Residential College Scholarship — PolyU |
| 2022–2026 | Belt and Road Scholarship — Hong Kong SAR Government |
Other Stuff
  | Outside of research, I play violin. I started learning at age 11, joined the Junior Symphony Orchestra of Sri Lanka, and currently play with the PolyU Orchestra. During my exchange at UW-Madison, I played with the university's String Orchestra. I also have completed ABSRM Grade 8 Violin, and ABRSM Grade 5 Theory of Music. Some of my playing can be found on my Instagram. I am a UN Millennium Fellow (Class of 2024), working on reducing gender disparity in STEM. I worked on a Social Poverty Alleviation project in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I conducted series of first aid training sessions for the children from Lahu Village. My exchange experiences and some other projects can be found on my portfolio website here. |
Blogs
I write from time to time. Here are a few blog posts.
| Four Years Later: I have Four Lessons |
| Vision Transformers, Intuitively: Patchify and GLU vs FFN |
| POV: It's Summer'23 and you're in Cambridge |
| Mad Badgers |