News
- I am leading WPI's effort on the DARPA Robotics Challenge! See here for more information.
- The Autonomous Robotic Collaboration (ARC) Lab at WPI has launched! See our website: arc.wpi.edu.
- I am looking for graduate and undergraduate students interested in research. Contact me by email if you're interested!
About Me
I received a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2005, where I started my robotics work in Hod Lipson's lab. I went on to graduate from the Ph.D. program at the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in 2011, where my advisors were Siddhartha Srinivasa and James Kuffner. While at CMU, I worked in the Personal Robotics Lab and completed interships at the Digital Human Research Center in Japan, Intel Labs in Pittsburgh, and LAAS-CNRS in France. In 2012 I completed a post-doc at UC Berkeley working with Ken Goldberg and Pieter Abbeel. In August 2012 I started as an Assistant Professor at WPI in the Robotics Engineering Program and Computer Science Department. I also founded the Autonomous Robotic Collaboration (ARC) Lab at WPI, which focuses on motion planning, manipulation, and human-robot collaboration.
Research Interests
I have a broad range of experience in robotics; including design, integration, control, sensing, and planning for multi-legged robots, helicopters, mobile manipulators, humanoids, and surgical robots. My research focuses on creating general-purpose motion planning and manipulation algorithms and applying these algorithms to problems in the domestic and surgical domains. I am interested in all aspects of algorithm development; including creating efficient algorithms, proving their theoretical properties, validating them on real-world robots and problems, integrating them with sensing and higher-level reasoning, and distributing them to open-source communities. I draw on ideas in search, optimization, control theory, and topology to develop my planning algorithms and to prove their properties. I also strive to develop algorithms for practical tasks which can generalize to many types of tasks and application areas.
Teaching
