Manikandan has spent his career at the point where hardware, signal and model meet — the part of engineering most software companies quietly outsource. Drones taught him the discipline: a flight controller does not forgive a lazy filter, and a sensor reading that is 40 milliseconds late is a crash, not a bug report.
He carried that standard into everything since. A spirometer waveform, a retinal photograph, a soil moisture curve under a paddy field, a video frame from a factory floor — they are all the same problem wearing different clothes. Get the signal clean, understand the physics underneath it, then let the model do the narrow thing it is actually good at.
Outside the lab he writes white papers, and he spends a meaningful share of his year in engineering colleges talking to students who have never met anyone who does this work for a living. He treats that as part of the job, not a favour.
Drone systemsDigital signal processingMedical imagingEmbedded sensingComputer visionApplied MLWhite papersCampus education