Ashita is a fourth-year PhD candidate at the Robotics Research Laboratory, RPTU Kaiserslautern, Germany, under the supervision of Prof. Karsten Berns. Her research focuses on social robotics for human-robot interaction (HRI), with a particular interest in humanoid robots as social agents in educational and social contexts.

Over the past three years, she has worked on both the technical and human-centered aspects of robotics, integrating large language models and vision systems into the Ameca and Robothespian platforms, and examining their impact on human perception, trust, and expectation alignment. Her current work investigates Ameca as a student companion, exploring how roles, backstories, and identity can shape social acceptance and engagement. In her last year, she has deployed the Ameca robot for robot-assisted learning (RALL) for international students in Germany and is extending her work from the university environment to elderly care with the deployment of Ameca at Seniorenmesse Kaiserslautern 2025, showcasing a hybrid generative and event-driven real-time local system designed for adaptive HRI.

She completed her bachelor's in Computer Science and Engineering from Mahatma Gandhi University, Kerala, India. Ashita's Master degree was focused on Intelligent Systems and Cognitive Psychology. And for her Master thesis, she researched a speech emotion recognition system based on para-linguistics cues in speech, which assists a robot called ROBIN, to understand the emotion in robot-directed speech.