Hi! I am a computer science PhD student in the Kahlert School of Computing (KSoC) and the Robotics Center at the University of Utah, advised by Dr. Alan Kuntz, with a research focus in robot learning, robot motion planning and autonomous systems. Here at the U, I particularly focus on surgical robot automation and learning-based modeling of flexible tendon-driven robots. Prior to joining the U, I completed my master’s degree in electrical and electronics engineering in the Biorobotics group at Hanyang University, where I studied reinforcement learning for robotic locomotion.

On-going Projects

Surgical Sensing Automation

This project proposes an automated sensing method for accurately mapping subsurface anatomy in robot-assisted surgery. It employs Bayesian Hilbert maps for occupancy mapping and A* graph search for planning efficient sensing trajectories (published in ICRA ‘24 paper) / Bayesian optimization for planning efficient sensing poses (published in ISMR ‘21 paper).

Deep Learning-based Kinematic Modeling of Tendon-driven Robots

This project addresses the challenge of modeling the shape of tendon-driven continuum robots by proposing a novel deep decoder neural network that accounts for hysteresis. The proposed method significantly improves shape prediction accuracy by leveraging point clouds and conditioning the model on both current and prior configurations. Experimental results on a physical robot demonstrate the method’s superior performance compared to an existing physics-based model and a learning-based model that does not account for hysteresis.