About me

I am a PhD student (year 6 of 7) in the Sung Robotics Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. I am interested in the intersections of computational geometry, robot design, motion planning, and engineering education. My main long-term research question is:

What geometric representations best enable algorithms and humans to find mechanism designs and motion plans for robots?

My current project examines this in the context of designing kinematic linkages for robots, where modelling link shapes as bent tubes allows us to apply path planning techniques to enable automated design and an interactive design tool. This is part of a larger effort towards automating robot design in a staged, modular pipeline: our goal is to enable non-experts to design their own robots and to support engineers in rapidly creating custom robots to meet new needs.

Previously, I have worked on motion planning based on simple movement abstractions for modular cubes that reconfigure by pivoting and for planar robots with touch-only sensing and unreliable heading. In the future I plan to continue related work in the geometric abstractions for robot design and planning, and to expand into further study of human-computer interaction and education about mechanism design. As part of an upcoming fellowship program for community-engaged research, I will study how students on high school robotics teams learn and use engineering tools such as CAD: I am particularly interested in how they experience their ability to customize designs and how this relates to their self-efficacy and development of STEM identity.

I am proud to mentor FIRST Robotics Competition (FRC) Team 9416, the International Θperatives of World Affairs (I.Θ.W.A) from Bodine High School in Philadelphia.