Undergraduate research project: This project focused on addressing safe reinforcement learning problems. Our goal was to design RL algorithms that maximize cumulative rewards over time while avoiding collisions. I began with a classic racecar example and created a simulation environment using PyBullet. To achieve our goal, we designed two sub-policies to address the objective separately and employed an additional factored policy to select between the sub-policies. Our final evaluation demonstrated that we achieved near-zero violations with low sample complexity during the testing benchmarks.

Undergraduate research project: In this project, we used a drone to fly around an object and automatically capture a set number of photos for a 3D reconstruction task. We combined a reinforcement learning algorithm with state estimation to find the optimal drone trajectory for achieving high-quality 3D reconstruction.

Ph.D. first-year rotation project: In this work, we take steps toward developing a system capable of learning to perform context-dependent surgical tasks by learning directly from expert demonstrations. To achieve this, we present and evaluate three approaches for generating context variables from the robot's environment. The environment is represented by partial-view point clouds, with approaches ranging from fully human-specified to fully automated.

During the middle of my Ph.D., I worked with the KUKA iiwa robot equipped with a 3-fingered underactuated hand with built-in TakkTile pressure sensors. I designed various manipulation primitives (e.g., grasp, place, dump, push) and executed them on the KUKA iiwa robot. I published three papers (RD-GNN, eRDTransformer, and DOOM and LOOM) with this robot.

During my visit to Stanford University, I worked with a customized holonomic mobile base combined with a kinova arm. This robot is capable of navigating, grasping, placing, pushing, pulling, and even tossing! Using these primitives, the robot can even feed you snacks (e.g., an apple). I completed a project (Points2Plans) with this impressive robot.

For the final project of my Ph.D., I am working with a Stretch robot. I enjoy working with this lightweight yet capable robot. I will design multiple primitives for the Stretch and focus on my final project, which involves reasoning about failure cases.