The past year has been amazing for RoboGrads, the Robotics Graduate Student Organization at UC San Diego. I would like to take this time to write a post to recognize our achievements and give thanks to the amazing organizers, speakers, volunteers and participants.

Major Event Support

1. Contextual Robotics Institute (CRI) Forum (also San Diego Robotics Forum) Open House
2. IEEE RoboSoft 2024 CRI Open House
3. US Robotics Roadmap Meeting Volunteer and Demo

And many more tours/demos for k-12 students and alumni.

Feed the Intellect

A series of Student Presentations of Research (accompanied by social with pizza). Thank our great speakers to present a wide range of Robotics research happening at UC San Diego.

1. Ehsan Zobeidi - Machine Learning Techniques for Metric-Semantic Mapping and Robot System Identification
2. Thai Duong - Learning Environment and Dynamics Representations for Autonomous Robot Navigation
3. Tao Wang - Fractal Landscapes in Policy Optimization
4. Iman Adibnazari - Data-Driven Modelling and Control of Bio-inspired Swimming Robots
5. Curtis Sparks - Curvature in Robotics, Tape Spring Based Actuation
6. Pengcheng Wu - Safety Assured Online Guidance for the Operations of Autonomous Systems under Uncertainty
7. Narayanan Elavathur Ranganatha - Online Vector Map Generation through Sensor-Configuration-Agnostic Semantic Mapping
8. Anoush Sepehri - A Soft Robotic Wrist Orthosis Using Textile Pneumatic Actuators For Passive Rehabilitation
9. Daniel Hoffman - How the Intersection of Robotics, Cloud and AI Technologies Will Revolutionize Retail Operations (Special talk from Brain Corp)
10. Zih-Yun Chiu - Robustness and Efficiency in High-Precision Autonomy: Surgical Automation and Beyond

RoboShare

Sharing a technique with colleagues.

1. Seth Farrell and Behrad Rabiei (RoboCoach) - ROS and ROS with LLM
2. Dongting Li - Design and Fabrication of Multi-Layer Laminate Origami-Inspired Robots
3. Stone Tao - Intro to Figma, How to Make High-Quality Figures, Slides, and Animations for Research
4. Narayanan Elavathur Ranganatha and Shashank Venkatramani - TensorRT Speed Up Deep Learning Deployment in ROS
5. Yifan Wang and Isabella Liu - Gaussian Splatting Introduction and Application

Social and Hike

Hikes - Torrey Pines, Black Mountain, Tecolote Canyon Trail, Oak Canyon to Grasslands Trail, Cedar Creek Falls Board Game Social Boba & Win Social Picnic/BBQ Social End-of-year Social at Dirty Birds Hangout @ Balboa Park

CRI Seminar Speaker Lunch

We are very fortunate to have a great line of speakers for CRI seminar through out the year and RoboGrads host lunch with the speakers and graduate students. Many students get to have lunch and chat with the speakers, including George Konidaris, Todd Murphey, Fei Miao, Kaushik Jayaram, Ye Zhao, Christian Hubicki, Maani Ghaffari, Tanmay Gupta, George Konidaris, Zachary Sunberg, Zipeng Fu, Luis Sentis, Gaurav S. Sukhatme, Talia Moore and Neera Jain. Most of the lunch experience are fun and filled with inspiring discussions.

Special Events

Summer Project / Intern Showcase

Most grad students have their summer filled with internship or projects, we hosted the event for them to showcase what they have done and share with others what’s out there during the summer.

RoboGrads T-shirt Design and Distribution

We crowdsourced T-shirt design and our designer Anand created our final version that was printed and distributed to many active members.

Mini Poster

Collected and printed 30+ Mini Research Poster in the lab showcasing research for collab members.

Thanks

We would like to thank CRI, GPSA and IGE for supporting our events.

Also thank our lab managers for joining us to help with the logistics Dhruv Shah, Azra Begzadic, Elizabeth Peiros and Iman Adibnazari.

Finally, thank the board members for their great efforts:

• Anya Bouzida (President)
• Seth Farrell (Vice-President)
• Pol Mestres (Treasurer)
• Rabeya Jamshad (Secretary)
• Pratyusha Ghosh (Social Activities Chair)
• Will Sharpless (Outreach Chair)
• Henry Zhang (Academic Events Chair)

The Robotics community is small, CRI at UC San Diego is young and growing fast. Hope many more students will join us to build the community.