Biography
I am the Research Lead for SpatialAI on the Atlas project at Boston Dynamics, where I take state-of-the-art perception algorithms and use them to enable new autonomous robot behaviors. In particular, my work is focused on combining semantic and geometric information (from both model-based and data-driven sources) so robots can understand and perform tasks in their environments. I am involved in the entire Atlas perception stack, from calibration and camera drivers to developing and maintaining cutting-edge machine learning models.
Previously, I was a research fellow in the Dyson Robotics Lab with Prof. Andrew Davison at Imperial College London. During my PhD, I worked under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Stefan Leutenegger on making real-time dense visual SLAM more robust through the fusion of inertial data and learned depth priors. I completed a bachelor’s degree in aerospace engineering from the University of Toronto, where my thesis project was supervised by Prof. Dr. Angela Schoellig.
Videos
Perception and Adaptability | Inside the Lab with Atlas
I was interviewed for this behind-the-scenes video at Boston Dynamics. It showcases the work our team has been up to for the last year or so, demonstrating how our machine learning and real-time perception systems enable Atlas to perform accurate and robust manipulation tasks in a factory-like environment.
Atlas Goes Hands On
A technical demonstration of the type of robot behaviors our team is working on. After receiving an input list of bin locations, Atlas autonomously moves engine covers between supplier containers and a mobile sequencing dolly in the specified order. Atlas is using a learned vision model I designed to detect and localize the fixtures and individual bins in the environment.
HD Atlas Manipulates
This video highlights some of the very early object detection and localization work I was involved with on HD Atlas. Most of the techniques we were using at this stage were very basic, but taught us a lot about how to manipulate heavy and difficult-to-perceive objects.
Atlas Gets a Grip
The very first Boston Dynamics video I got to help make (I mostly worked on the object localization)! It was very stressful but also a lot of fun!
Publications
iMODE: Real-Time Incremental Monocular Dense Mapping Using Neural Field
ICRA 2023 (Best Navigation Paper Award Finalist)
Towards the Probabilistic Fusion of Learned Priors into Standard Pipelines for 3D Reconstruction
ICRA 2020
DeepFusion: Real-Time Dense 3D Reconstruction for Monocular SLAM using Single-View Depth and Gradient Predictions
ICRA 2019
