I am a PhD student at Northwestern University's Center for Robotics and Biosystems, advised by Professor Michael Rubenstein. I previously worked under the guidance of
Dr. Ken Nakagaki and Dr. Matthew Walter at the University of Chicago.
Swarm User Interfaces, LLMs, Multi-modal Interaction
Motivation
This project seeks to give users direct, flexible control over swarm-based and modular robotic systems, via hand-shaping and speech.
Inspired by Radical Atoms and Claytronics,
this paper pushes towards visions of fluid, tangible user control. This is a passion project that I presented at ACM UIST 2025 in Korea!
Towards Programmable Matter: Design and Interaction for Modular Robotic Systems
Exploring a novel underactuated cube robot with a single flyweel-actuator.
I designed a robust cube-shaped robot that can flexibly locomote using a single embedded actuator, and created created a MuJoCo simulation of the hardware.
I have a decent PPO control policy that enables basic flipping, turning, and translational movement.
Early hardware testing for cube rotation via vibration.
Policy learns to flip from horizontally-oriented flywheel to vertically-oriented flywheel.
Skills Involved
Robotics Simulation, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Hardware Design (PCB design, 3D modelling)
Relevant Research Domains
Deep Reinforcement Learning, Self-Reconfiguring, Modular Robotics
Initial sketch of idea.
Motivation
This project pushes towards a new form of shared autonomy, where user directly defines the form and functionality of the system.
It was inspired by past work on self-reconfiguring, modular robotic systems,
such as M-Blocks.
My goal for this project is to allow users to assemble shapes with cube primitives, which
immediately know how to move based on a shape-flexible control policy.
CLAW: Learning Continuous Latent Action World Models via Adversarial Latent Regularization
Tewodros Ayalew, Sam Wheeler, Matthew Jeung, Xiao Zhang, Andre de la Cruz Arce, Kaylene Stocking, Michael Maire, Matthew Walter
Working under a PhD student, I have contributed by training and deploying RL agents, visualizing model training and outputs, working on model architecture, and completing other tasks like dataloading.
Relevant Research Domains
Representation Learning, World Models, Diffusion, Robotics
Skills Involved
PyTorch, CUDA
Side Projects
1lb Combat Bot
Horizontal spinner bot designed completely from scratch. Features weapon belt system and asymmetrical blade.
.png)
.gif)
