Michael Burgess

Hello! I am currently a Master’s student in the Perceptual Science Group at MIT under Prof. Ted Adelson. During my graduate studies, I was previously a teaching assistant for the graduate course “Robotic Manipulation” taught by Prof. Russ Tedrake.

Last year, I graduated from MIT with a Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering. As I continue into graduate school, I am primarily interested in developing new robotic perception and control pipelines for manipulation tasks that utilize information available through tactile sensing hardware. I would like to create robots that can perceive the dynamic properties of the objects they interact with, in order to facilitate multi-sensory understanding and empower more intelligent decision-making. More generally, I am interested in investigating new learning-based architectures for performative high-level reasoning.

During my undergraduate years at MIT, I worked as a research assistant in the Biomimetic Robotics Lab under Prof. Sangbae Kim. I studied how to effectively generate high-level trajectories for a quadruped robot across complex, discrete terrain. Most notably, I developed a “decoupled” planning system that utilized rapid sampling methods to generate a path of footsteps and a formal dynamic optimization to determine a continuous trajectory for the robot. This showed performance improvements over traditional approaches to locomotion planning for legged systems. This project was my undergraduate thesis.

Throughout my young career, I have garnered vast multidisciplinary expertise. Outside of robotics, I have had the opportunity to work on complex fluids research projects, challenging mechanical design problems, software development, and much more. Projects such as these are shown throughout my portfolio on this web page. I have the ability to work on the full stack from hands-on hardware manufacturing to high-level algorithm design.

I’m originally from seacoast New Hampshire, but am now located in the Cambridge / Boston area. In my free time, I love to play guitar, skateboard, and paint.

Thank you for taking a look at some of my work!