DRL Lab Members

Graduate Students, Postdocs, and Staff (Current)

PhD. Students

  • John Romanishin
  • Lucas Liebenwein
  • Cenk Baykal
  • Noam Buckman
  • Teddy Ort
  • Brandon Araki
  • Veevee Cai
  • Aaron Ray
  • Lillian Chin
  • Alexander Amini
  • Andy Spielberg
  • Joseph DelPreto
  • Tim Seyde
  • Annan Zhang
  • Tsun-Hsuan Wang

Postdocs

  • Ryan Truby
  • Josie Hughes
  • Xiao Li
  • Ramin Hasani
  • James Bern
  • Paul Tylkin
  • Yutong Ban
  • Shuguang Li

M.Eng Students

  • Daniel Wrafter
  • Elaheh Ahmadi
  • Christopher Chang
  • Jacob Philips
  • Ryan Sander
  • Matthew Beveridge
  • Juan Salazar
  • Jeana Choi

Staff

  • Mieke Moran (the Group’s Administrative Assistant)
  • Murad Abu-Khalaf (Program Manager, Toyota-CSAIL)
  • Hunter Hansen (Software Engineer)

Lab Alumni

PhD Students

  • Ekaterina Pelekhov, “Information Organization: Practical Algorithms and Systems,” (Dartmouth College 2001), now at Google Research
  • Jonathan Bredin, “Market-based control of mobile agent systems,” (Dartmouth College 2001), now consultant
  • Keith Kotay, “Self-reconfiguring Robots: Designs, Algorithms, and Applications,” (Dartmouth College 2003), now consultant
  • Qun Li, “Reactive Sensor Networks,” (Dartmouth College 2004), now Faculty at College of William and Mary
  • Rob Fitch, “Planning for Heterogeneous Self-reconfiguring Robots,” (Dartmouth College 2004 , now Faculty at University of Technology Sydney, Australia
  • Craig McGray, “Design, Fabrication, and Programming of MEMS Micro Robots,” (Dartmouth College 2005), now at NIST
  • Paulina Varshavskaya, Distributed Reinforcement Learning for Self-reconfiguring modular robots, (MIT 2007), now consultant
  • Iuliu Vasilescu, Adaptive Illumination for Underwater Imaging with Autonomous Robots and Sensor Networks, (MIT 2009), now at TIA Research
  • Ajay Deshpande, Coverage Problems in Mobile Sensing, (MIT 2008, jointly supervised with with Sanjay Sarma), now at IBM Research
  • Martsette Vona, Virtual Articulation and Kinematic Abstraction in Robotics, (MIT 2009), now at NASA JPL
  • Mac Schwager, A Gradient Optimization Approach to Multi-Robot Control, (MIT 2009), now at Faculty at Stanford University
  • Ara Knaian, The Electropermanent Magnet: Design and Applications to Programmable Matter, (MIT 2010, jointly supervised with Neil Gershenfeld), now an entrepreneur
  • Carrick Detweiler, Adaptive Decentralize Control of Underwater Sensor Networks for Modeling Water Phenomena, (MIT 2010), now Faculty at University of Nebraska, Lincoln
  • Elizabeth Basha, In-Situ Prediction on Sensor Networks Using Distributed Multiple Linear Regression Models, (MIT 2010), now Faculty at University of the Pacific
  • Jan Stumpf (now at Intel Deutschland GmbH, Germany)
  • Andrew Sugaya (now at Upskill)
  • Ryan Schoen (now at Google Research)
  • Justin Werfel (now Senior Research Scientist at Harvard University)
  • Sarah Bates
  • Adrienne Bolger (now Senior Research Scientist at Harvard University)
  • Anna Derbakova (now at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)
  • Kenneth Donahue
  • Daniel Gurdan
  • Jeff Hoff
  • Alex Hornstein
  • Todd Layton
  • David Moore
  • Peter Osagie
  • Philipp Russ
  • Lauren White
  • Stefan Sosnowski
  • Kyle Gilpin Shape Formation by Self-Disassembly in Programmable Matter Systems, (MIT 2012), now at TemperatureAlert
  • Brian Julian, Mutual Information-based Gradient Ascent Control for Distributed Robotics, (MIT 2013), now at Google Research
  • Sejoon Lim, Congestion-Aware Traffic Routing for Large-Scale Mobile Agent Systems, (MIT 2012), now Faculty at Kookmin University, Korea
  • Marek Doniec, Autonomous Data Muling Using Optical Wireless Communication and Agile Control, (MIT 2013), now at Proprietary Trading Startup
  • Seung-Kook Yun, Decentralized Coordination for Manufacturing: Algorithms and Systems, (MIT 2010), now at Aurora
  • Stephanie Gil, Adaptive Communication Networks for Heterogeneous Teams of Robots, (MIT 2014), now Faculty at Harvard University
  • Andrew Marchese, Design, Fabrication and Control of Soft Robots with Fluidic Elastomer Actuators, (MIT 2014), now at Amazon Robotics
  • Mikhail Volkov (now at SMBC Nikko Securities, Tokyo)
  • Cynthia Sung (now Faculty at UPenn)
  • Sebastian Claici
  • Steven Guitron (now at MGH)
  • Chongyuan Xiang (Bill)
  • Jenny Shen (now at Microsoft)
  • Alex Wallar (now at The Routing Company)
  • Felix Naser (now at BMW, Germany)
  • Robert Katzschmann, Building and Controlling Fluidically Actuated Soft Robots: From Open Loop to Model-based Control, (MIT 2018), now Faculty at ETH Zurich, Switzerland
  • Wilko Schwarting (now at iSee)

Masters Students

  • Yeo Reum Yoon, Modular Robots for Making and Climbing 3D Trusses (MIT 2006), now at LG Display
  • Srujan Linga, A Novel Positioning System for Accurate Tracking in Indoor Environments, (MIT 2007), now at Goldman Sacks
  • William Selby, Visual Tracking using Small Autonomous Aerial Robots, (MIT 2011), now at Aurora
  • David Stein
  • Byoung Kwon An, Sticker Controller and Sticker Programming for Smart Sheets, (MIT 2011), now at Autodesk Research
  • Mario Bollini, BakeBot: Autonomous Recipe Execution with a Mobile     Manipulator, (MIT 2012), now at Boston Dynamics
  • Daniel Soltero, Generating Informative Paths for Persistent Sensing in Unknown Environments, (MIT 2012), now at Apple
  • Afian Anwar, ChangiNOW: A Mobile Application for Efficient Taxi Allocation at Airports, (MIT 2013), now at Afi Labs
  • Gavin Hall, Decentralized Mixing Function Control Strategy for Multi-Robot Informative Persistent Sensing Applications, (MIT 2014), now at Tesla
  • Cathy Wu, now Faculty at MIT
  • Bianca Homberg, Robust Priprioceptive Grasping with a Soft Robot Hand (MIT 2016), now at Iron Ox
  • Stuart Baker
  • Pramod Kandel, Efficient Semantic Retrieval on K-Segment Coresets of Video Streams (MIT 2015), ow at Microsoft
  • Tim Zhong, now at Palantir Technologies
  • Rohan Banerjee, now Ph.D. Student at Cornell University

Postdocs

  • Nora Ayanian (now Faculty at USC),
  • Zack Butler (now Faculty at RPI),
  • Nikolaus Correll (now Faculty at UC Boulder),
  • Daniel Feldman (now Faculty at U. Haifa),
  • Ross Knepper (now Faculty at Cornell),
  • Cagdas Onal (now Faculty at WPI),
  • Mac Schwager (now Faculty at Stanford),
  • Steven Smith (now Faculty at the University of Waterloo),
  • Mike Tolley (co-supervised with R. Wood, now Faculty at UCSD)
  • Eduardo Torres-Jara (now Faculty at WPI),
  • Ankur Mehta (now Faculty at UCLA)
  • Shuhei Miyashita (now Lecturer at the University of York, UK)
  • Kyle Gilpin (now at TemperatureAlert)
  • Mehmet Dogar (now Faculty at the University of Leeds, UK)
  • Jingjin Yu (now Faculty at Rutgers)
  • Nick Wang (now Faculty at National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan)
  • Robert Katzschmannn (now Faculty at ETH Zurich, Switzerland)
  • Changhyun Choi (now at University of Minnesota)
  • Guy Rosman (now at Toyota Research Institute)
  • Stephanie Gil (now Faculty at Harvard University)
  • Robert MacCurdy (now Faculty at University of Colorado, Boulder)
  • Stephane Bonardi (now at JAXA, Japan)
  • Javier Alonso-Mora (now Faculty at TU Delft, The Netherlands)
  • Hayim Shaul (now at DiviNetworks, Ltd., Israel)
  • Sedat Ozer (now Researcher at Bilkent University, Turkey)
  • Liam Paull (now Faculty at University of Monteral, Canada)
  • Cristian-Ioan Vasile (now Faculty at Lehigh University)
  • Jeffrey Lipton (now Faculty at University of Washington)
  • Harry Lang
  • Alyssa Pierson (now Faculty at Boston University)
  • Igor Gilitschenski (now at Toyota Research Institute)