Completed Work

  • Ceiling bot [Closed]

    Ceiling bot was a project in *always on* ambient intelligence. How will engineers one day build a robot that utilizes continuous power while still remaining mobile and actuated? Our idea was to run the robot on walls and ceilings.

  • Motion tracking for Local Warming [completed]

    Led by the Sensable Cities group at the MIT Media Lab to address the energy demands of our growing world, Local Warming applied localized and targeted heating. My work focused on tracking people despite infrared interference.

  • Urban madness [completed]

    Urban madness was a collaboration with Dr. Pam Hinds and Dr. Jon How to study the intricate, and fluid dynamics of teamwork with multiple mixed autonomy robots, interacting and being commanded by a single human leader/coworker.

  • Augmented tangibles [completed]

    Augmented tangibles was a project in fusing virtual and real world environments fluidly. Anthony DeVincenzi and I applied this idea toward eccescopy by using iPads as portals to the actuated world.

  • Mars escape [completed]

    Authoring autonomous behaviors can be seen as *the* problem to solve in smart, interactive robotics. Systems like Façade require complex behavior authoring that can take years to fully build. Mars Escape was inspired by Orkin's Restaurant Game in which everyday users take on the roles of agents in an interaction and provide authoring data that can be mined for behaviors that an autonomous agent can leverage. This was a novel project that leveraged virtual characters online to learn new behaviors that the robot could use in the real world.


Work performed during my Masters

  • Transparency in Learning and Interaction

    Transparency, in general, allows a robot reveal its inner thoughts through nonverbal signalling and gesture. Much of my work at Georgia Tech, both in class and for my Master's Thesis explores the idea of making state well understood externally.

  • Social Learning Mechanisms

    Social learning mechanisms as defined by Tomasello in The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition employ more than imitation learning, which is the most common type of learning in robotics. It can also be defined as learning through emulation, stimulus enhancement, and mimicking. We define novel differentiations between these mechanisms that were modeled after Tomasello's definition and characterize their effects to understand their role in social learning.