I'm an Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Duke University, Director of the Intelligent Robot Lab, and a member of Duke Robotics.
Prior to joining Duke, I was a postdoc at the Learning and Intelligent Systems group at MIT CSAIL, with Professors Leslie Pack Kaelbling and Tomas Lozano-Perez; prior to that I completed my PhD at the Autonomous Learning Laboratory at the University of Massachusetts Amherst under the supervision of Professor Andy Barto.
My research aims to build intelligent, autonomous, general-purpose robots capable of completing a wide variety of tasks in environments that are unstructured and partially specified.
I focus on understanding how to build hierarchical robot controllers that can construct and execute long-horizon plans in unknown or semi-specified environments. I develop and apply techniques from machine learning, reinforcement learning, optimal control and planning to construct well-grounded hierarchies that result in fast planning for common cases, and are robust to uncertainty at every level of control.