Posts by Collection

portfolio

Self-Driving Car Automated Lost & Found January 2019 - Prototyped a system that could be placed in an autonomous car to proactively alert passengers when an item is left behind.

Electric Skateboard January 2019 - Designed and built an electric skateboard to gain hands-on engineering experience. Helped introduce me to CNC machining.

Brayton Energy: Analytical Design August 2019 - Used mechanical and fluid simulations to inform the design of a header block for a heat exchanger in a concentrated solar power plant.

NASA: Machine Learning for Prediction of Flow Transition May 2021 - Tested and refined a machine learning architecture that could be used to predict the onset of turbulence across an airfoil.

Oatmeal Viscosity Experiment ⭐ December 2021 - Conducted an experiment for an undergrad course at MIT where I measured the viscosity of oatmeal with changing recipe.

CaBER Video Processing Library ⭐ January 2022 - Wrote a code library which could be used to automatically characterize fluids from footage of CaBER experiments. This is helpful in studying the behavior of non-Newtonian fluids.

Robot Design & Manufacturing May 2022 - Designed and built a task-oriented robot for an undergrad course at MIT. The robot was designed to complete tasks on a gamboard in competition with other students.

Underactuated Skateboard Control System ⭐ May 2022 - Optimized dynamic trajectories to perform tricks on a simplified 2D skateboarding model. By controlling just the center of mass position of the rider, we can manipulate the board's movement.

Markforged: Part Packing ⭐ August 2022 - Developed a geometric algorithm to optimize the packing space on 3D printing build plate. Using simulated annealing approach, could fit 15+% more parts than previous method.

Firehose Cleaner ⭐ December 2022 - Designed a portable system to clean carcinogens off a firehose after a fire. The system is fully hydro-powered and has washing and spooling components.

Hula Hooping Robot ⭐ December 2022 - Built a robot to learn more about the mechanical principles of hula hooping. Abstracted the system to two degrees of freedom and simulated trajectories before implementing on hardware.

Rock Skipping Robot ⭐ December 2022 - Developed a control architecture to pick-up a rock from a known location and skip it across water. The system was implemented and tested in a custom physics-based simulator.

Yo-yo Manufacturing May 2023 - Worked on a team to design and mass produce custom plastic yo-yos. Parts were manufactured using injection molding and thermoforming processes.

publications

Decoupled Kinodynamic Planning for a Quadruped Robot over Complex Terrain M. Burgess, Decoupled Kinodynamic Planning for a Quadruped Robot over Complex Terrain. MIT dSpace. 2023.

Learning Object Compliance via Young’s Modulus from Single Grasps with Camera-Based Tactile Sensors M. Burgess, J. Zhao, L. Willemet, Learning Object Compliance via Young's Modulus from Single Grasps with Camera-Based Tactile Sensors. arXiv. 2025.

Grasp EveryThing (GET): 1-DoF, 3-Fingered Gripper with Tactile Sensing for Robust Grasping M. Burgess, E. Adelson, Grasp EveryThing (GET): 1-DoF, 3-Fingered Gripper with Tactile Sensing for Robust Grasping. arXiv. 2025.

talks

Talk 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field Published: March 01, 2012

Tutorial 1 on Relevant Topic in Your Field Published: March 01, 2013

Talk 2 on Relevant Topic in Your Field Published: February 01, 2014

Conference Proceeding talk 3 on Relevant Topic in Your Field Published: March 01, 2014

teaching

Teaching experience 1 Undergraduate course, University 1, Department, 2014

Teaching experience 2 Workshop, University 1, Department, 2015