Currently, I'm a research scientist at Willow Garage. You can find my new webpage here.

I'm a former student in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in the Learning and Intelligent Systems Group run by Professors Leslie Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez. This webpage was created then, and I've left it largely as-is.

As a grad student I worked on robust manipulation under uncertainty, which means that I want robots to be able to grasp objects and put them down accurately even when they have noisy estimates of where the objects are, or what their hands are feeling, or even the precise details of the shapes of the objects. Normal, precise grasp planning methods often result in failing to grasp or even knocking objects over when the world is noisy. This is something that people often solve using compliant manipulators that just glom over the object, but for some tasks, precise grasps are required (such as grasping handles, using tools, or doing assembly operations). In our case, we model the world as a POMDP (Partially Observable Markov Decision Process), and try various complexities of planning such as solving the full POMDP (when tractable) or, more recently, using World-Relative Trajectories (pre-planned trajectories that are expressed relative to the current most likely state) as our actions, tracking the current belief state using contact information that we gather when executing these trajectories in a guarded, compliant fashion, and using POMDP forward search to select good actions to take next.

Here's a link to my PhD thesis.

Webpages dealing with research:
Abstract-state POMDPs for Grasping (solving the full POMDP)
World-Relative Trajectory POMDPs for Grasping (using POMDP forward search)

Here are links to some of my other publications:

Here are some pages with abstracts of past work:
Grasping POMDPs
Imitation Learning of Whole-Body Grasps

Here is my resume.

And here is a page with pictures of some of my crafts.