Selected research and engineering projects exploring embodied intelligence, robot learning, bio-inspired locomotion, simulation, and real-world robotic systems.

Doctoral Research

From Water to Land Unchanged

Can sensory feedback enable an elongate robot to transition from swimming in water to crawling on land without changing its underlying locomotor circuit?

Inverse Reinforcement Learning

Can demonstrations from bio-inspired controllers be used to design reward functions that remain aligned with expert behavior and generalize beyond the demonstrations?

Amphibious Path Planning

How can a salamander-like robot plan and follow paths across water and land while respecting the constraints of undulatory, body-driven locomotion?

Deep Reinforcement Learning

How can deep reinforcement learning reveal which proprioceptive feedback pathways are useful for robust undulatory swimming?

Descending Modulation

How do descending control signals shape turning, gait modulation, and locomotor recovery in salamander-like robots?

Sim-to-Real Transfer

How can bio-inspired controllers help bridge the gap between physics-based simulation and real robotic locomotion?