Spring 2026 Robotics MSE Thesis and Capstone Lightning Talks and Poster Session

This is an in-person event with in-person attendance in Towne 217 for Lightning Talks and Levine Lobby for Poster Session.

This year we will have an “Audience Choice” for best Lightning Talk and Poster. Please be sure to vote for your favorite! Voting will take place during the Poster Session using a QR code.

9:30am – Lightning Talks

Welcome Remarks
Dr. Ani Hsieh – ROBO Program Chair

Bryan Alfaro
Advised by Dr. Vijay Kumar
Whole-Body Control of 2-DOF Aerial Manipulators with Reinforcement Learning

Joshua Caswell
Advised by Dr. Eric Eaton
Vision-Assisted Radar for Autonomous Robotic Triage

Haiyue Chen
Advised by Dr. Rahul Mangharam and Dr. Antonio Loquercio
PIVOT: Physics Informed Vision-based Online Tuning

Zixuan Geng
Advised by Dr. Yong Fan and Dr. Nadia Figueroa
State-Conditioned Structured Operators for Probabilistic Forecasting of fMRI Dynamics

Natey Kim
Advised by Dr. Nadia Figueroa
Musculoskeletal Digital Twin Model for Real-Time Human-in-the-Loop Feedback Control Systems

Anuriha Kodali
Advised by Dr. Vijay Kumar
Collective Ethical Reasoning with LLMs: A ‘Judge-and-Jury’ Framework for Multi-Agent Decision Making

Yihan Li
Advised by Dr. Nadia Figueroa
RoboHockey: A Robotic Benchmark for Dynamics Whole-body Contact-rich Tasks

Yi Fan Li
Advised by Dr. Lingjie Liu
Distillation for Edge Computing Compatible Hand Mesh Reconstruction Models

Wenjing Mao
Advised by Dr. Antonio Loquercio
RoSHI: A Versatile Robot-oriented Suit for Human Data In-the-Wild

Vineet Pasumarti
Advised by Dr. Antonio Loquercio
Agile Flight Emerges from Multi Agent Competitive Racing

Anh-Quan Pham
Advised by Dr. Dinesh Jayaraman
Automatically Improving Simulation Physics of Articulated Objects

Faraz Rahman
Advised by Dr. Nikolai Matni
Exploratory Noise and Scaling Continuous Imitation

Shreyas Raorane
Advised by Dr. Linh Thi Xuan Phan, Dr. Rahul Mangharam, and Dr. Ani Hsieh
Robust Coordination: Eliminating the Connectivity Constraint

Aryan Roy
Advised by Dr. Nikolai Matni
Language to Low-Level Quadruped Control via Iterative LLM-Guided Trajectory Optimization and Residual Reinforcement Learning

Manasi Shrekhar
Advised by Dr. Cynthia Sung
Folding to Float: An Origami-Inspired Variable Volume Buoyancy Control

Eric Sigg
Advised by Dr. Doug Jerolmack and Dr. Cynthia Sung
Treading Precisely: Bimodal Terrain Sensing with a Quadrupedal Robotic Explorer

Tuen Yue Tsui
Advised by Dr. Lingjie Liu
Continual Learning is Bayesian Filtering

Tony Wang
Advised by Dr. Dinesh Jayaraman and Dr. Kostas Daniilidis
Evaluate, Enhance, and Explain Robot Foundation Models

Yuchen Zheng
Advised by Dr. Nadia Figueroa
Predicate-Free Language-to-Plan Validation with Learned 3D Operator World Models

Ethan Sanchez
Advised by Fernando Cladera and Dr. Ani Hsieh
Flexbot: Reverse Engineering an Industrial Robot into an Open-Source Research Platform

Rhythm Chandak, Vaibhav Thakkar
Advised by Dr. Rahul Mangharam and Dr. Antonio Loquercio
Learning Robot Dynamics on the Lagrangian Manifold – A Forced Variational Integrator Framework

10:00am – Poster Session in Levine Lobby

11:00am – Awards for Best Lightning Talk and Poster Announced