For students that want to join our VIP teams please check out our available projects for current VIP projects here:
*updated for Fall 2026
You are encouraged to reach out the mentor BEFORE you apply. Self motivated students can also participate research outside VIP programs.
Quadrupedal Navigation
Mentor: Max Asselmeier (mass@gatech.edu)
Project description: The quadrupedal navigation (QuadNav) project will continue our ongoing efforts to establish a pipeline for online, real-time perception-informed navigation using the Robot Operating System (ROS). This navigation pipeline will include global and local planning, a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) process, and other quadruped-specific modules including terrain traversability and steppability estimation.
Whole-Body Tactile Navigation for Humanoid Robots
Mentor: Jaehwi Jang (jjang318@gatech.edu)
Project Description:
This project would investigate whole-body tactile navigation for humanoid robots operating in darkness, smoke, fire, dust, or sensor-blackout conditions. The goal is to enable a humanoid to use distributed tactile sensing on the hands, arms, elbows, torso, back, and lower limbs to perceive nearby structure and navigate toward an goal when visual sensing is unreliable or unavailable. The project would combine three components: (1) tactile hardware design and sensor processing for real-time execution; (2) compliant whole-body control for contact-rich environment; and (3) tactile based state estimation and hierarchical navigation in an unfamiliar indoor environment. The target outcome is an integrated simulation-to-hardware demonstration.
Tactile Sensor Characterization and Perception for Robotics
Mentor: Jaehwi Jang (jjang318@gatech.edu), Jon (Junjie) Sheng (jsheng45@gatech.edu)
Project Description:
Students will gain hands-on experience in:
- Research documentation, visualization, and publication-oriented robotics workflows
- Tactile sensor fundamentals and multi-sensor integration
- Experimental design, force calibration, and mechanical characterization
- Linux/Python-based sensor data acquisition and analysis
- Reliability testing, data-quality evaluation, and reproducible experimentation
Dexterous Robot Manipulation for Clinical Tasks
Mentor: Jiming Ren (jren313@gatech.edu)
Project Description:
Interested in robotics, physical intelligence, and working with real robots and human-like multi-finger robotic hands? Join us in building the next generation of intelligent robots for clinical and laboratory applications!
This project focuses on teaching multi-finger robotic hands to perform human-like dexterous manipulation of real laboratory tools, such as pipettes, tubes, and beakers. You will help build a data collection pipeline from the ground up, capturing human hand motion and robot–object interaction data for challenging clinical tasks.
Through this project, you will gain hands-on experience with:
- Real robotic systems and dexterous manipulation
- Motion capture, cameras, and multimodal data collection
- Building and debugging robotics systems
We are looking for motivated undergraduate students who are excited to learn, build, and contribute to the future of physical intelligence.
Human Skill Acquisition and Multimodal Sensing for Dexterous Manipulation
Mentor: Yi-Shiuan Tung (Yi-Shiuan.Tung@colorado.edu), Feiyang Wu (feiyangwu@gatech.edu)
Project Description:
This project studies how humans learn complex physical skills and adapt their strategies with experience. Participants will perform assembly tasks of increasing difficulty while we collect multimodal data such as eye gaze, hand/body motion, force, and potentially EEG/EMG. Undergraduate researchers will help set up and run user studies, operate sensing equipment, collect and organize data, and assist with annotation and analysis. The broader goal is to use these data to understand when humans reason, adapt their strategies, recover from failures, and develop fluent skills, and translate these learning principles to robots.
Learning Dexterous Manipulation Skills
Mentor: Feiyang Wu (feiyangwu@gatech.edu)
Project Description:
The goal of this project is to train VLA models for dexterous hands with RL control. We will be training RL policies as well as a VLA policy for hierarchical control.
WAM for Long-Horizon Humanoid Manipulation
Mentor: Rui Yan (ryan91@gatech.edu)
Project Description: Interested in world models, reinforcement learning, and seeing your policies run on a real humanoid robot? Join us in building the next generation of long-horizon manipulation systems!
This project develops a framework for long-horizon manipulation that integrates human demonstrations, learned world models, and reinforcement learning. You will help fine-tune a pre-trained WAM (world-action model) on human demonstration data, learn action-conditioned world models for future-state prediction, and apply RL for residual action injection to make the executed motions more precise and reliable. The full pipeline will be validated in simulation and deployed on a real humanoid platform.
Through this project, you will gain hands-on experience with:
Pre-trained robot foundation models and demonstration-based fine-tuning
Action-conditioned world models and model-based prediction
Reinforcement learning for residual policy refinement
Robotic simulation (MuJoCo, Isaac Lab) and sim-to-real transfer
Deployment and debugging on a real humanoid platform
We are looking for motivated students who are excited to learn, build, and contribute to the future of embodied intelligence.
Humanoid Navigation through Embodied AI and Learning
Mentor: Ziwon Yoon (zyoon6@gatech.edu)
Project Description: Interested in humanoid robotics, embodied AI, and working with real robots in challenging environments? Join us in developing autonomy systems that connect high-level AI reasoning with the physical capabilities of humanoid robots!
This project focuses on humanoid navigation in complex real-world environments through embodied AI and learning. You will work on autonomy frameworks that integrate perception, navigation, and locomotion, with a particular focus on grounding high-level semantic reasoning from VLM/VLN/VLA models in a robot’s physical constraints and capabilities, such as stability limits, locomotion feasibility, and contact dynamics.
By connecting vision-language reasoning with physically feasible motion, we aim to enable humanoid robots to navigate safely and robustly through unstructured environments such as rough terrain and cluttered outdoor spaces.
Through this project, you will gain hands-on experience with:
- Real-robot experiments in complex environments
- Humanoid robot navigation and locomotion
- Vision-language models (VLM/VLN/VLA) and embodied AI
- Learning-based traversability and terrain understanding
- ROS-based perception, planning, and control systems
VIP Undergraduate Research and Education
Our LIDAR group is leading a multi-disciplinary Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) team — Agile Locomotion & Manipulation (co-advised by Profs. Ye Zhao and Seth Hutchinson) — that offers a transformative mechanism to engineering and science education by engaging undergraduate students in a cross-college, multi-semester, and large-scale project team. Currently, the team is composed of 80 undergraduate students from diverse engineering, science, and computing disciplines. Over the past few years, the VIP team has been an indispensable and integrated component of our research team and actively contributed to various aspects of our experiment-focused research projects, including the design of a biomimetic upper-body manipulator, bipedal robot Cassie foot sensor pad design and integration, quadrupedal SLAM perception, Cassie and Digit locomotion control and experimentation, Kuka manipulation perception, and Gelsight tactile sensing. Our VIP research is supported by the NSF Grant # 1924978, #2144309, and Georgia Tech Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program.
Team Achievements
2024 Second place in the ME Capstone Competition (Robotic Achilles Foot Team)
2022 First place in the Robotics Track of the GaTech VIP Innovation Competition (Gelsight Manipulation Project) click the image below for the competition video
2022 Georgia Tech Vertically Integrated Program (VIP) Outstanding Mentor Award and school-level winner of Georgia Tech CTL TA Award (Nathan Boyd)
2022 Most Outstanding Exhibit Award in STEM at the Yale Science and Engineering Association (YSEA) Science Fair (Silver awardee: E. Andrew Botchwey and Gold awardee: Noah Morales, students in Georgia Tech ENGAGES program)
2021 First place in the Hardware, Devices & Robotics Track of the GaTech VIP Innovation Competition (Athena Biomimetic Robot Avatar Project)
2020 IEEE/ASME International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics Best Late Breaking Results Poster Award
Georgia Tech President’s Undergraduate Research Awards
2023 Fall awarded PURA project: Effectiveness of Bimanual Handling of Deformable Objects with Hybrid Adhesion Rohan Punamiya, Mechanical Engineering, 2022 January – present, Graduate mentor: Chaitanya Mehta
2023 Spring awarded PURA project: Signal Temporal Logic on Bipedal Locomotion
Sixing Chen, Electrical and Computer Engineering, 2022 September – present, Graduate mentor: Zhaoyuan Gu
2022 Fall PURA Travel award: Leveraging Heterogeneous Capabilities in Multi-Agent Systems for Environmental Conflict Resolution presented at 2022 IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)
James Ni, Mechanical Engineering, 2020 January – present, Graduate mentor: Zhaoyuan Gu and Yunhai Han (co-mentored by Prof. Sam Coogan)
2022 Fall awarded PURA project: Imitation Learning for Loco-manipulation Tasks
Kasia Y. Fadeeva, Mechanical Engineering, 2022 May – present, Graduate mentor: Zhaoyuan Gu
2022 Fall awarded PURA project: A Human-Collaborative Robot Team With Heterogeneous Capabilities and Safety Guarantee Through Time-Varying Control Barrier Functions
James Ni, Mechanical Engineering, 2020 January – present, Graduate mentor: Zhaoyuan Gu and Yunhai Han (co-mentored by Prof. Sam Coogan)
2022 Spring awarded PURA project: Underactuated Motion Planning and Control for Bipedal Robot Running and Jumping Wei Pao (William), Mechanical Engineering, 2021 September – present, Graduate mentor: Zhaoyuan Gu
2022 Spring awarded PURA project: Routing Cables in 3D Space Using Soft Tactile Sensors Achintya Mohan, Computer Engineering, 2021 January – present, Graduate mentor: Nathan Boyd
2022 Spring awarded PURA project: Development of a Human-Robot Collaboration Team with Safety Guarantee by Control Barrier Functions James Ni, Mechanical Engineering, 2020 January – present, Graduate mentor: Yunhai Han
2021 Fall awarded PURA project: Improving Trajectory Optimization Feasibility for Problems with Intermittent Contact Using Reinforcement Learning Abhinav Kumar, Computer Science, 2021 January – 2021 December, Graduate mentor: Luke Drnach
2021 Fall awarded PURA project: Design for Modular SLAMBox and Robust Real-time SLAM Pipeline for Legged Robots Vishwa Ramkumar, Mechanical Engineering, 2020 January – present, Graduate mentor: Dong Jae (Danny) Lee
2021 Summer awarded PURA project: Robotic Arm Perception and Manipulation with Robust Multi-Level Optimization Nima Jadali, Computer Science, 2021 January – present, Graduate mentor: Zhigen Zhao
2021 Spring awarded PURA project: Computer-Aided Manufacturing and Dynamic Analysis of a Six Degree of Freedom Stewart Platform Manipulator Dongheon Han, Mechanical Engineering, 2019 Sep. – 2021 May, Graduate mentor: Dong Jae (Danny) Lee
2020 Summer awarded PURA project: Design and Control of a Self-Balancing Unmanned Bicycle James Ni, Mechanical Engineering, 2020 January – present
2020 Fall awarded PURA project: Athena Humanoid Upper Body Robot – Head Design, Eye Subsystem Lee Jun (Marina) Ahn, Mechanical Engineering, 2020, Graduate mentor: Dong Jae (Danny) Lee
2020 Fall awarded PURA project: Visual Servoing with Obstacle Avoidance in Robotic Arms Ziwei (Rebecca) Zheng, Mechanical Engineering, 2019 January – 2020 May, Graduate mentor: Zhigen Zhao
2020 Spring awarded PURA project: Robust Perception for Dynamic Grasping Skills in Clutter Tanner Beard, Mechanical Engineering, 2019 July – 2020 May, Graduate mentor: Zhigen Zhao
2020 Spring awarded PURA project: Model and Control of Robust Contact-Rich Manipulation Skills. Ziyang (John) Zhang, Mechanical Engineering, 2019 August – 2021 December, Graduate mentor: Zhigen Zhao
2020 Spring awarded PURA project: Athena Humanoid Upper Body Robot Design and Kinematics-based Motion Planning Zhengyang (Kris) Weng, Mechanical Engineering, 2021, Graduate mentor: Jeremiah Coholich
Georgia Tech SURE Program Students
Chirayu Mihir Salgarkar (Mercer University, Summer 2021, co-advised with Prof. Samuel Coogan, Georgia Tech SURE Robotics Program)
Harjinder Singh Pawar (Biomedical Science, The City College of New York, Summer 2022, co-advised with Prof. Anqi Wu, Georgia Tech SURE Program, Center for Engineering Education and Diversity)
Arda Yigitkanli (Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech, Summer 2023, Georgia Tech SURE Program, Center for Engineering Education and Diversity)
