Community Profile: MSU graduate follows love of robotics from Nepal to Starkville

As a teenager, Ajaya Dahal could see Mount Everest from his backyard. The hilly region of Nepal where he lived was “kind of perfect.”

But Dahal’s love for robotics and embedded systems carried him away from his home country almost a decade ago, bringing him to the United States and eventually, to Mississippi State University, where he has spent the last five years.

“If I had to leave my home and my family … why not for the best place in this world?” Dahal said.

Dahal said he first fell in love with robotics when he was in ninth or 10th grade watching robots fight in a competition on television. He started teaching himself how to build robots, taking apart old electronics to repurpose them and making a two-hour drive to purchase other necessary components from the nearest store that sold them.

“I wanted to build a remote control car from scratch,” Dahal said. “That’s how it started.”

For Dahal’s last two years of high school, he transferred to a school with a robotics club, fueling his passion further. Soon, he was working on robots in every spare moment, even working on robots until he fell asleep with the parts still in front of him.

“I just loved it,” Dahal said. “I was building this line follower robot. And then I started working on it at night, and I fell asleep. And my mom came and knocked in the morning, and she was like, ‘What are you doing early morning? Why did you wake up so early?’”

Dahal came to the United States in 2015 after graduating high school. He has not returned to Nepal since, he said.

“I miss riding motorcycles in the mountains,” Dahal said. “I used to spend time doing that with my sister and I haven’t been back in … almost 10 years.”

When he arrived, Dahal first attended a university in Missouri for a semester before transferring to schools in Texas to finish his associate’s degree.

Dahal took a year away from school to work before transferring in 2019 to MSU, where he earned his bachelor’s degree in computer programming engineering and his master’s in electrical and computer engineering.

“Electrical (engineering) is more focused toward high voltage stuff, like the power transmission things, and I’m more interested in the low voltage things, like (embedded) systems, building (printed circuit boards) and circuits and writing codes,” Dahal said.

An embedded system is a computer system that has a dedicated function within a larger mechanical or electronic system.

Once he was at MSU, Dahal said, he worked at a co-op with Hunter Engineering in Raymond, though the program was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. Dahal returned to Starkville, where he started working as a student researcher in MSU’s Electrical and Computer Engineering department and IMPRESS Lab while he finished his degrees.

Dahal said he has worked on researching lane tracking systems for autonomous vehicles, similar to the lane-assistance system that is in many newer cars. He also worked on building a system to detect contraband cell phones inside of prisons, a subject that he has now co-authored three or four papers on, along with a soil-moisture detection drone project for the United States Department of Agriculture.

While Dahal was finishing his master’s degree, he also got a job working remotely as a product application engineer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) working on high speed ethernet. In his day-job, he works with hardware to help with high speed communication for data centers.

In Dahal’s free time, he also works on building robots, like drones and a self-balancing inverted pendulum robot. He also has been working toward his private pilot’s license in his free time, he said, getting more than 60 hours of airtime at the Columbus-Lowndes County Airport.

“The feeling is amazing, when you fly it and you do your first solo,” Dahal said.

Dahal graduated with his master’s earlier this month. Soon, he said, he will have to move on to help support his younger sister as she attends nursing school in Austin, Texas. Still, he said, he will miss being at MSU.

“I will definitely miss Starkville, but I think it’s time for a change,” he said.