The research conducted in my lab (established in August 2022) focuses on developing safety, control, estimation and learning algorithms for collaborative human-aware robotic systems: robots that can safely and efficiently interact and physically collaborate with humans and other robots in the human-centric dynamic spaces we inhabit.
This involves research at the intersection of machine learning, control theory, artificial intelligence, perception, and psychology - with a physical human-robot interaction perspective.
Enrico Martini (Visiting CIS PhD student from University of Verona, Italy; real-time constraint-aware 3D human pose tracking, advised by Nicola Bombieri)
Master Student Researchers
Ho Jin Choi (MEAM ‘24; MS Thesis on "Visuo-tactile Active Exploration", additional work on dynamic grasping, active mapping and eeg-based control co-advised by Ruzena Bajcsy)
Haihui Gao (MEAM/ESE ‘24; MS Thesis on "Learning Second Order Dynamical System Motion Policies")
George Gao (ROBO ‘25; Independent Study on "Learning Safe Dynamical Systems with Diffusion")
Paul (Sanhyub) Lee (ROBO ‘25; Independent Study on "Real-time Force Prediction with Wearable Ultrasonic Sensors")
Research Engineers
Harshil Parekh (ROBO ‘23; integration of perception with reactive control)
Sunan Sun (ROBO ‘23; statistics, learning, non-Euclidean geometry)
Shaoting Peng(ROBO ‘24; Perception, robust tracking and EEG-base intent estimation for interactive robots Paper 1, Paper 2, Paper 3 -- next PhD at UIUC)
Satyajeet Das (ESE ‘24; MS Thesis "Towards Vision-based Safety: A Real-time Approach for Generating CBFs using Depth Sensors", Paper on EEG-based intention estimation -- next PhD at USC)
Zhiquan Zhang (ESE ‘24; MS Thesis "Real-Time Safety-Critical Passive Torque Control with Analytic and Learning-based Constraints" [Awarded Best MS Thesis in ESE department], Paper on same line of work -- next PhD at UIUC)
Haoming Li (ESE ‘24; MS Thesis on "Lipschitz Continuity of Neural Network based Signed Distance Functions")
Parth Sanghavi (MEAM ‘24; Independent Study on "Accelerated 6D Object Pose Estimation")
Lance Tan (DATS ‘24; Independent Study on "Optimizing Robotic Manipulator Performance through Machine Learning")
Qi Xue (CIS ‘24; Independent Study on "Energy Analysis of Safe Drone Control Strategies")
Vaibhav Wanere (MEAM ‘24; Independent Study on "Learning Complex Motion Skills")
Atharva Makarand Pradhan (MEAM ‘24; Independent Study on "Glove-based Teleoperation of Hand-Arm System")
Recent Talk
Keynote talk at L4DC 2023 on "Safety, Adaptation and Efficient Learning in Physical Human-Robot Interaction: A Dynamical Systems Approach."