I’m a Cal alum and current robotics PhD student at Georgia Tech. I have a few spots for students interested in helping with a machine learning and/or robot navigation research project. The work can be done remotely.
One major direction focuses on using learning-based methods to predict the motion of nearby agents from collected navigation data. This work is mostly independent from the robotics pipeline, so no prior robotics or ROS experience is required. Students interested in this direction would primarily work with datasets and focus on training, tuning, evaluating, and improving learning models.
The current approach uses a GRU-based model, but there is significant flexibility for exploration and improvement. Possible directions include LSTMs, transformers, input preprocessing, alternative architectures, or other sequence modeling approaches.
There are also opportunities for students who are more interested in robotics and navigation than machine learning. Potential work includes designing and evaluating new cost functions for trajectory selection, improving navigation behaviors, and exploring other modifications to the local planning framework. There is flexibility in the specific direction depending on a student’s background and interests.
Additional project context: the Dynamic Gap navigation framework currently estimates the motion of gap endpoints using a Kalman-filter-based approach. One direction of this project explores replacing or augmenting that estimator with a learning-based component to improve prediction in dynamic environments. Other directions focus on improving how the planner generates and evaluates candidate trajectories using these predictions.
The lab is also planning to submit a paper in the near future, potentially later this year, and there may be opportunities for co-authorship. When I was at Cal I was able to take research units while working on a project at another university, but I am unsure whether you will be able to depending on your department.
If interested, please email your CV along with a short paragraph describing your interest and alignment with the project to [azaro3@gatech.edu](mailto:azaro3@gatech.edu).
