Dr. P. Vivekananda Shanmuganathan

Professor

P. Vivekananda Shanmuganathan received his B.E. in Mechanical Engineering from Government College of Engineering, Tirunelveli (Madurai Kamaraj University), M.E. in Computer Integrated Manufacturing from PSG College of Technology, Coimbatore (Bharathiar University), and PhD in Robot Dynamics from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

Dr Shanmuganathan started his career as Research Associate with PSG College of Technology where he worked on projects related to Robot Vision, path planning and computer-aided process planning. He was a recipient of GATE Scholarship for graduate studies at PSG, and later, Institute Research Scholarship for PhD at IIT Bombay.

Dr Shanmuganathan is currently Professor of Mechanical Engineering with Dayananda Sagar University. He has over 24 years of teaching and research experience.

Prior to joining here, Dr Shanmuganathan was with VIT University for over 14 years, serving at senior academic and administrative positions. He was Coordinator of PG Programmes in Civil and Mechanical Engineering and was Division Chair of Mechatronics. He served as a member of the committee that introduced fully-flexible credit system.

Dr Shanmuganathan has been instrumental in getting VIT into international academic partnerships under Erasmus Mundus, Erasmus+ and STINT programmes with a number of European Universities. Through these projects, students and faculty received funding up to Rs 1.50 Cr for higher studies and exchange visits. He has visited a number of universities in Europe and South East Asia and had been with Politecnico di Milano (Technical University of Milan), Italy, as Erasmus Mundus academic staff.

Dr Shanmuganathan's academic association has been significantly with the Master's programmes in Mechatronics and Automotive Engineering, teaching courses such as Robotics, Mechatronics, MEMS, Vehicle Dynamics, Tribology, and Advanced Vibration Engineering apart from courses such as Engineering Drawing, Engineering Mechanics and Instrumentation and Control at undergraduate level. He also had the opportunity to introduce project-based and research-based learning methodologies in his undergraduate and master's courses thanks to the curriculum-applied learning framework introduced at VIT.

Dr Shanmuganathan's research interests are robotics, automation, vision, and multi-body systems. He has consulted for a project related to modeling of a dual-arm manipulator for army tank, and for design improvement of packaging machinery. He was Co-Principal investigator for a project -- studies on using biosignals for robotic prosthetic devices -- that received a funding of Rs 21.67 lacs from DST.