I’m a 2nd year PhD student at the University of Texas, Austin, advised by Dr. Lillian Chin as a member of MERGe Lab. I am a National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship Fellow.
My research spans robotics tactile sensing, design, and accessibility. For robots, I am currently working on computational tools for optimizing tactile sensor designs. For design and accessibility, I am co-designing university campus accessibility solutions that center the knowledge disabled people already have and use.
Outside of research, I have industry experience working on SLAM at Dusty Robotics and microfluidics automation at XGenomes. When I’m not working, I like to take care of my house plants, cook, and read :)
Lack of information about bathroom access is a major pain point in disabled people’s access to public spaces — a problem known as the ‘bladder’s leash’. We designed a bathroom map platform that builds on a student organization’s participatory mapping activism and combines it with crowd-sourcing. We performed open-ended formative studies, and user-testing.
Determining whether a proposed continuum arm design can complete a specified task and load is computationally expensive due to the need for simulation. We introduce a novel method of analysis that eliminates the need for simulation, speeding up computation by 80x, and creates novel metrics for evaluating arm designs against tasks.
Inspired by octopus arms, helically-wound muscles greatly increase continuum arm workspaces, but they are more difficult to model and control. We present a novel application of Lie theory to simplify the modeling of constant twist soft robots, and unify modeling across different designs. Won 3rd place best workshop poster.
In my 3rd year I co-founded Twist Lab - a soft robotics research group with 10 students. As PM I was responsible for raising over $7,500 in lab funding from grants, supported projects in the design, control, and simulation of soft robotics, and helped students apply to fellowships.
During my gap year before college, I built an autonomously hydrofoiling boat prototype at an early stage startup capable of multiple minutes of airtime. We added motorized hydrofoils with ROS controls to an existing boat hull, developed a simulation, and used it to implement a cascaded PID controller.
As the lead course assistant, I (re-)designed the final-project system for the Feedback Controls course at Olin, and created kits for all students. In the month-long project the students levitate a permanent magnet using an electromagnet and a hall-effect sensor. Gif by Krishna Suresh.
In my scientific computing class, I implemented a particle based model of the non-linear phase change of glass using Python. To render the results, I implemented a modern OpenGL GPU-programming shader pipeline, complete with a phong lighting model and full camera movement in 3D space.