EmPRISE Robotics Laboratory: Contact-Rich Dynamic Planning

Working on contact-rich planning for robotic arms, focusing on ways to combine reaction-based control (such as MPC) with offline contact-focused global planning for a robotic arm equipped with external haptic force sensors. This work will allow for robotic movement with dynamic obstacles such as people while minimizing the chance of reaching local minima and ensuring the robot has the ability to react over the course of its trajectory.

As part of this research, right now I'm in the process of finalizing a report (first author) on improved manipulability-inclusive metrics, heuristics, and a novel cost function for RRT*.

This experience has been absolutely crucial with regards to understanding and experiencing the full cycle of research PhD students and professional researchers go through from first author perspective. I worked on my own research project with complete independence other than weekly advisor meetings, performing literature review, narrowing down key exploration topics and strategies, building code infrastructure, deriving and testing various original algorithms, figuring out what I should focus on, successfully testing my methods, and writing a report on my findings.