2025 GRASP Robotics Master’s Award Round-Up

^{_{Text by Jillian Mallon}}

_{^{Caption for featured photo: Outstanding Research Award winner George Gao posed with Dean Vijay Kumar as he accepted his award at the annual SEAS Graduate Awards Ceremony.}}

At the end of each spring semester, the School of Engineering and Applied Science (SEAS) recognizes Master’s students who have made extraordinary contributions to the University of Pennsylvania and the field of engineering. Master’s students in each SEAS department are eligible for four award categories: Outstanding Academic Award, Outstanding Research Award, Outstanding Teaching Award, and the Outstanding Service Award. The GRASP Lab is delighted to share that Robotics Master’s students received awards in each category!

Outstanding Academic Award

The Outstanding Academic award was presented to Shubhodeep Aditya, who, in addition to excelling in coursework, also worked with the GRASP Lab as a research engineer in Professor Nadia Figueroa’s research group throughout the second year of his master’s program. Shubhodeep joined the Robotics Master’s program with determination to glean as much knowledge from his coursework as possible with the ultimate goal of preparing himself for a research and development position in the robotics industry. He had built a foundation of high-level practical exposure to robotics during research projects as an undergraduate, and sought to build a more theoretical foundation for his skills, while also polishing his technical skills. To do this, he meticulously chose courses based on his goals.

“I like to think of the courses I took during my Master’s as falling into two buckets: those that built a solid foundation of concepts, and those that allowed me to apply those concepts in practical settings. To build a foundation, I enrolled in courses such as CIS 5800: Machine Perception, ESE 6500: Learning in Robotics, ESE 5460: Principles of Deep Learning, MEAM 5200: Introduction to Robotics, and MEAM 6200: Advanced Robotics. The overlap between the topics covered in these various classes also allowed me to understand the same concepts from different viewpoints, which helped make the concepts clearer,” Shubhodeep explained. “To get practical knowledge, I took some project-based and application-focused courses such as MEAM 5100: Design of Mechatronic Systems, ESE 6150: F1-tenth Autonomous Racing, and CIS 6800: Advanced Machine Perception. These courses focused on implementation of a combination of relevant concepts in various domains, which helped reinforce the topics I learned in other classes.”

When faced with a particularly challenging course, ESE 6500: Learning in Robotics, Shubhodeep challenged his knowledge even further by acting as a teaching assistant for the course for a chance to review the topics again and deepen his understanding by helping other students to grasp the concepts of the course. As a result of his diligent efforts, he will be joining a warehouse robotics startup, Mytra, as a Computer Vision Engineer.

Outstanding Research Award

Also a member of the Figueroa Robotics Lab, George Gao was presented the Outstanding Research Award. George teamed up with MEAM PhD student Tianyu Li for his first research project on addressing the problem of data scarcity in robot learning. Their shared interests in improving the reliability and generalizability of vision-based robotic policies led to the development of OCR: Out-of-Distribution Recovery with Object-Centric Keypoint Inverse Policy for Visuomotor Imitation Learning – a system that enables vision-based, end-to-end robot policies to generalize unforeseen distributions without the need for additional training data. “Interestingly, this project emerged from the lessons of a prior failed attempt to achieve similar goals using a different method—proof that failure is often just a step toward success,” George reflected.

George was recognized with a first-author spotlight publication for this work at the 2024 Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) Workshop on Lifelong Learning for Home Robots. The project was also recently accepted to the main conference track at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2025), and George is already working to expand the project even further.

“Since its completion, my research has expanded to broadly explore ways to make robotic policies more generalizable and robust,” explained George. “This includes leveraging Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to enable robots to design and use tools autonomously, as well as investigating the integration of VLMs with reinforcement learning to automate robotic skill acquisition.” One of these efforts has since evolved into a new project, VLMgineer, a collaboration between the Figueroa Robotics Lab and Professor Dinesh Jayaraman’s Perception, Action, and Learning (PennPAL) Group. This project has been accepted into the RSS 2025 1st Workshop on Robot Hardware-Aware Intelligence as an Oral Spotlight. “I believe our work demonstrates the incredible display of physical ingenuity by VLMs when utilized correctly, and we are all very excited by the potential that VLMgineer holds,” said George.

Outstanding Teaching Award

The Outstanding Teaching Award was presented to Benedict Onyekwe, who served as a teaching assistant for MEAM 5200: Introduction to Robotics, MEAM 6200: Advanced Robotics, and MEAM 6240: Distributed Robotics in order to deepen his understanding of these courses that he had already taken and learned a great deal from. “I’m deeply grateful to professors Ani Hsieh and Cynthia Sung, whose encouragement motivated me to take on the TA roles and grow into the responsibilities,” Ben said.

His roles challenged him to adjust his teaching approaches for students with different backgrounds. Some students understood the fundamental concepts of the course but lacked programming experience, while others had the opposite problem. To address this, Ben and his teaching team compared feedback on what best worked with students and created quick-reference guides and primers.

“Serving as a TA was deeply fulfilling in so many ways,” recalled Ben. “I always felt a strong sense of purpose and community during our TA meetings, where we consistently aligned our efforts to best support the students. For some of the courses, I held regular weekly office hours, supervised hardware lab sessions and extra sessions during project deadlines or exam periods. Through all this, the most rewarding moment was seeing students gain confidence in topics they initially found challenging.”

Outstanding Service Award

Robotics Master’s student Erica Santos was presented with the Outstanding Service Award, in part for her role on the GRASP Social Committee. Throughout three semesters of service, Erica brainstormed schedules, tournaments, and meals for social events that would bring the GRASP community together. Erica helped strategize giveaways and activities that would incentivize students to participate and came up with a service project idea to write letters for Cardz for Kidz.

During her time as a Master’s student, Erica also got involved in other groups at the School of Engineering and Applied Science. She worked with Penn’s Underrepresented Student Advisory Board in Engineering (USABE) as a graduate student advisor and participated in some initiatives coordinated by Cora Ingrum Center (CIC) for Community and Outreach.

“I believe it was the most rewarding to see people come back to me for help or advice because they understood I was well connected and trusted me,” Erica said. “I want to thank GRASP for being a collaborative, welcoming, and helpful community. I was never afraid to ask for guidance because it was almost always freely given, and that helped me grow immensely.”

Robotics Master’s Thesis Awards

Outside of the departmental awards, two Robotics Master’s students were recognized by an audience choice vote that took place after the Spring 2025 Robotics MSE Thesis and Capstone Lightning Talks and Poster Session. Attendees of the talk and poster session were invited to vote for the best poster and lightning talk after each student presented their Master’s thesis research. The winner of the Best Poster Award was Jack Campanella for his poster on “Integrated Hardware and Software Codesign for Controlling Underactuated Aerial Robots”. He collaborated on this project with his Master’s advisor, Professor Vijay Kumar, and Jake Welde, a MEAM PhD student. Michaela Feehery received the Best Lightning Talk award for her presentation on “Event-Based Respiration Detection for Autonomous Robotic Triage”. Her research stemmed from working with her Master’s advisor, Professor Eric Eaton, on the Penn Robotic Non-contact Triage and Observation (PRONTO) team competing in the DARPA Triage Challenge.

Congratulations to all of the outstanding Robotics Master’s students for another successful year!