Hello, I’m Mike.

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Aeronautics and Astronautics department at MIT. As a researcher, I work on developing methods for effective human-robot teaming with a focus on contact-rich tasks that are physically demanding on people. My main research interests lie in shared autonomy and robot learning. Before working in robotics, I was a manager at Epic Systems working on patient portals. I received my BS in mechanical engineering from Tufts University in 2014 and my MS/PhD in mechanical engineering from UW-Madison in 2019 and 2023, respectively. If you are interested in chatting/collaborating, don't hesitate to reach out!

What do I work on?

I look for ways to make it easier for robots and humans to work together to complete complicated tasks. My research falls at the intersection of Learning from Demonstration (LfD), physical Human-Robot Interaction (PHRI), and shared autonomy.

Curriculum Vitae Research Statement

Recent News

September 2023 - Started as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the AeroAstro department at MIT working with Julie Shah
September 2023 - Some of our work on human-robot teaming for sanding was featured in the UW-Madison 175th Anniversary Video!
July 2023 - Defended my thesis: "Toward Effective Human-Robot Teaming through Corrections"
May 2023 - Excited to announce that I received a fellowship and will be starting as a postdoc at MIT this Fall!

Older News

May 2023 - Attended and presented at the Boeing Collaborative Robot Summit in Mesa, Arizona
April 2023 - Invited speaker for the Tufts Mechanical Engineering Colloquia
October 2022 - Attended and Presented at IROS 2022 in Kyoto, Japan
September 2022 - Our Franka Emika robot makes an appearance in the new UW-Madison commerical for TV spots.
August 2022 - Demonstrated Human-in-the-loop robot sanding prototype onsite at Boeing Everett.
June 2022 - A Method For Automated Drone Viewpoints to Support Remote Robot Manipulation and Registering Articulated Objects With Human-in-the-loop Corrections were both accepted to IROS 2022.
June 2022 - Received the Grainger Wisconsin Distinguished Graduate Fellowship!
December 2021 - Passed my preliminary exam titled "Effective Human-Robot Teaming via Corrections."
December 2021 - Hosted Dr. Arash Ajoundani as part of the Wisconsin Robotics Seminar Series.
October 2021 - Hosted two sessions and presented at two sessions at IROS 2021
September 2021 - Affordance Template Registration via Human-in-the-loop Corrections was accepted for presentation at the 2021 IROS Space Robotics Workshop
June 2021 - Informing Real-time Corrections in Corrective Shared Autonomy Through Expert Demonstrations was accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
June 2021 - Virtual summer internship at NASA Johnson Space Center.
May 2021 - Final class project investigating different 2D planning algorithms
Mar 2021 - Virtually hosted Dr SK Gupta from USC for the inaugural Wisconsin Robotics Seminar Series
Feb 2021 - "Recognizing Orientation Slipin Human Demonstrations" was accepted for publication at the 2021 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Feb 2021 - "Corrective Shared Autonomy for Addressing Task Variability" was accepted for publication in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RAL)
Feb 2021 - Presented a video and live Q&A as part of the 2021 NASA TACP Showcase
May 2020 - Created a method, FAMrec, for 3D pose recognition of arbitrary meshes as part of a computer vision class project
Feb 2020 -Completed Delta Intern Project - Problem-Based Learning Activity to Promote Adaptive Expertise
Nov 2019 -Traveled to Boeing Charleston to tour facility as part of the NASA ULI Project
Jul 2019 -Traveled to Washington DC as part of NASA University Leadership Initiative Kick-off

Recent Publications

I try to keep my google scholar page up to date. Below is an automatically generated set of recent pre-print publications from ArXiv: