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Indian-origin student builds autonomous forklift at U.S. firm
Phalle helped design Warp’s digital twin and computer-vision systems that now guide the company’s autonomous forklift.
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Malvika Choudhary - Wed, 19, Nov 2025
- 14:45 EST
- 15
Yash Phalle / Northeastern University
Indian-origin student Yash Phalle played a key role in developing an autonomous forklift and supporting robotics systems during his co-op at Warp, a Los Angeles-based logistics company.
A student at Northeastern University, Phalle helped build Warp’s first robotics framework, including digital twin models, computer-vision systems and warehouse-mapping tools that now support the company’s automation programme.
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According to the university’s press, Warp CEO and co-founder Daniel Sokolovsky said the company aimed to automate the storage stage of its pallet-moving process and relied on Phalle from “initial ideation” through the development of the systems that enable the robot to navigate.
At Warp’s prototyping facility in Los Angeles, Phalle began by creating a digital twin of the warehouse—a simulated layout of aisles, pallet slots and columns—to serve as a reference for autonomous navigation. He then deployed a quadruped robot equipped with a 360-degree lidar sensor to scan the warehouse floor and document obstacles and structural details.
“The main purpose of the robot was to go across the warehouse, scan it and identify any potential concerns that we need to mitigate and report,” Phalle told university press.
The systems he built enabled Warp’s autonomous forklift to follow exact coordinates while moving pallets. Although his co-op ended as the forklift was being integrated, Sokolovsky said the computer-vision system is fully operational.
“The robot is now integrated into the computer vision system and we are able to control it through the computer vision system,” he said. He credited Phalle with laying the groundwork for Warp’s robotics program. “He really helped us start this whole robotics program. It didn’t exist before Yash came.”
Phalle has continued his work in robotics as a research assistant at Northeastern’s Dependable Autonomy Laboratory, focusing on real-time hybrid control for obstacle avoidance using visual language models and reinforcement learning.
He also serves as a teaching assistant for AI-focused courses, mentoring students and professionals on generative AI, large language models and newsroom automation.
He is pursuing a master of science in artificial intelligence at Northeastern’s Khoury College of computer sciences and has earned top grades in artificial intelligence, algorithms, reinforcement learning and machine learning. He holds a bachelors in technology in computer engineering from the Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology.
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