Projects

I’m part of the Gemini Robotics team at Google DeepMind, building vision-language-action models that let robots understand a task, reason about it and act. I focus on the model’s intelligent whole-body control capability.

Gemini Robotics 2, announced in July 2026, controls whole humanoid bodies from feet to fingertips. It balances the robot’s center of gravity so it can step, squat and bend through cluttered spaces instead of reaching from a fixed stance, and the same model also drives two-armed platforms and dexterous hands.

A walking policy trained with reinforcement learning can look robust in every demo and still hide failure cases. This line of work attacks policies on purpose to find those weak spots, gives them a sense of their own uncertainty and risk, and uses human preferences to shape how they behave.

It also covers robots that share our homes, like making a small home quadruped walk quietly enough to live with.

Developing open-source elevation mapping software, elevation_mapping_cupy. It turns depth and LiDAR data into a robot-centric height map on the GPU, with traversability, smoothing, inpainting and plane segmentation built in, and was later extended to fuse color and semantics.

On top of the map: learning to fill in areas hidden behind rocks, and planning paths with motion costs learned from how the robot actually moves.

I competed in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge as a member of Team CERBERUS, and we won first prize, a $2,000,000 award, in the Final Event.

Legged and flying robots had to explore, map and search an unknown underground course of tunnels, caves and a subway station, with no GPS and almost no communication back to the operators.

Before legged robots, I worked on drones and rovers: a drone that localizes itself by sticking AR markers onto its surroundings, a drone that anchors a tether so a rover can winch itself up a cliff, and decision-making for teams of drones searching for targets.

Along the way: a lunar-surface simulator for a microrover at ispace, and a dual-arm store-stocking robot at Hitachi.