About Me

I am a Research Scientist at the SPARKlab working with Prof. Luca Carlone in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

I was a Postdoctoral Associate at MIT, from 2021-2023. In 2021, I received a Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering with a focus on perception-aware planning for robotic systems from the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at West Virginia University (WVU) where I was advised by Prof. Yu Gu. During my Ph.D., I was a visiting researcher and affiliate from 2018-2019 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) working with Dr. Kyohei Otsu and Dr. Ali-akbar Agha-mohammadi. From 2014-2016 under the advisement of Prof. Yu Gu, I led the software development for perception and navigation for the WVU team in NASA’s Centennial Sample Return Robot Challenge (SRRC) winning $750,000 for 1st place in the 2016 challenge.

Recent News

[7/2024] Presenting at ICRA@40: “Aggressive Aerial Grasping using a Soft Drone with Onboard Perception” and “Indoor and Outdoor 3D Scene Graph Generation via Language-Enabled Spatial Ontologies”

[07/2024] Presenting at NeSy24: “Indoor and Outdoor 3D Scene Graph Generation via Language-Enabled Spatial Ontologies”

[05/2024] Accepted at npj Robotics in the Nature Portfolio: “Aggressive Aerial Grasping using a Soft Drone with Onboard Perception” (arxiv)

[03/2024] Accepted at IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L): “Indoor and Outdoor 3D Scene Graph Generation via Language-Enabled Spatial Ontologies” (arxiv)

[01/2024]: Accepted at International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR): “Foundations of Spatial Perception for Robotics: Hierarchical Representations and Real-time Systems.” (arxiv, youtube, github)

[01/2024] Excited to server as Associate Editor for IROS 2024!

[05/2023] Presenting at RSS Workshop on Robot Representations for Scene Understanding: “Informing 3D Scene Graph Generation with Common-Sense Spatial Knowledge”

[02/2023] Accepted at IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO): “A Survey on Active Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: State of the Art and New Frontiers” (arxiv)

[01/2023] Excited to server as Associate Editor for IROS 2023!

Fun Facts

I marched snare with Drum Corps International (DCI) groups Southwind 2007, Spirit of Atlanta 2008-2010, and Phantom Regiment 2011 (as center snare from 2009-2011).

Contact

If you’re interested in collaborating or just want to chat, feel free to reach out! The easiest way to contact me is via email. Looking forward!