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I am co-organizing a Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2025 workshop! The workshop is Beyond Rigid Worlds: Representing and Interacting with Non‑Rigid Objects (RINO). This year CoRL accepted only 42% of the proposed workshops, and its reputation continues to grow as a leading venue for embodied intelligence–it currently ranks #18 in AI overall, and it would rank #3 in robotics by h5-index if categorized accordingly. This workshop aimed to build connections among top talent and leaders in robotics and AI to develop the academic and industry ecosystem around robotic interaction with non-rigid objects.

It was fun to co-organize this conference with an all-star team of Ph.D. students and Postdoctoral Scholars from all around the world, many of whom I first met at previous global robotics events (e.g., the KTH RPL Summer School and the IEEE ICRA Deformables Workshops). Thank you to Marcel Büsching, Jad Abou-Chakra, Alessio Caporali, Bardienus Duisterhof, Alberta Longhini, Jens Lundell, Priya Sundaresan, Mingrui Yu, and Kaifeng Zhang for making this event so great!

I am co-organizing a demo at the Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL) 2025! The demo is “CloudGripper - An Open Source Cloud Robotics Testbed for Robotic Manipulation Research, Data Collection and Experimentation at Scale.” CloudGripper is a cloud robotics platform with more than 30 internet‑connected robot arm workcells developed at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden. Each workcell includes the same sensors and lights. In this demo, we present an update on the latest developments on CloudGripper as a fully open-source, freely available community platform that remotely supports reproducible experiments, benchmarking, and large‑scale dataset collection. The demo features teleoperation and programming of remote robots; demonstrations of recent work on automatic data‑collection systems for rigid and deformable objects; and data-driven robotic scene augmentation for domain randomization in robotic datasets. Multiple attendees can interact with CloudGripper in real time and explore the cloud-native testbed for scalable data collection and future foundation model development.

Muhammad Zahid has done an amazing job building CloudGripper. The efforts of Zahid and Florian through their company, Scaleup Robotics AB, engaging global users in the past few years truly democratizes access to robotics. They have facilitated robot manipulation workshops at the Deep Learning Indaba 2024 Workshop on Robot Learning for Africa in Senegal, at the 2024 San Francisco Public Library Tech Week in the U.S., and at the Summer School on Reinforcement Learning and Large Language Models at the Università degli Studi di Padova, Italy.

It was fun to co-organize this demo along with other researchers who use CloudGripper for their large-scale, real-world robot learning data collection, Shutong Jin, Axel Kaliff, and Ruiyu Wang.

References

[1] M. Zahid and F. T. Pokorny, “CloudGripper: An Open Source Cloud Robotics Testbed for Robotic Manipulation Research, Bbenchmarking, and Data Collection at Scale,” in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2024, pp.12076–12082.

I defended my dissertation, “Representing and Manipulating Deformable Linear Objects.” The raw recording and the dissertation pre-print are available and will be updated with published versions soon!

For Ph.D. candidates looking to defend, I recommend optimizing for impact and inviting everyone to your public session! I used Luma to help organize invitations, update event details, and announce changes to attendees. I also used Zoom to share the event with a remote audience and record the presentation.

I attended the AAS/AIAA Space Flight Mechanics meeting in Līhuʻe, Kaua’i, Hawai’i since Su Yeon Choi and I teamed up to prepare her Multi-IMU Sensor Fusion work there. I chaired two sessions on satellite Rendezvous, Proximity Operations, and Docking (RPOD) while there. Future free-flying robots in space habitats definitely need to be experts at RPOD! We hope multi-IMU fusion can improve localization for these operations in the future too!

Throughout 2024, I studied space commercialization by analyzing public corporate financial data for commercial space companies in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. This was a big effort by my team: Luca Ferrone, Shinsuke Kito, Giulia Cambone, Antonio Stark, and Chawalwat Martkamjan. During the course of the project I also grew accustomed to 2:00AM calls to meet workday meeting timezones for CEOs in Asia!

The 2023 IAF IAC was geopolitically tense and sponsored an abbreviated version of the conventional IAF International Programme/Project Management Committee (IPMC) Young Professionals’ (YP) workshop. I still learned a lot by spending the day discussing Human Capital Management with Abdullah AlGarrash, Roxy Fournier, Maximillian Kirchoff, and Kishan Thakkar!

I spent the most fun week of my Ph.D. at the Happy Tammsvik conference hotel in Bro, Sweden where I participated in the KTH Royal Institute of Technology Division of Robotics, Perception, and Learning Summer School. This experience fostered lasting collaborations and deepened my appreciation for the robotics innovations emerging from Europe.

I was selected as a MIT Aero/Astro Future Leader in Aerospace and presented my work on Change Detection with Astrobee! More information about the symposium can be found on the MIT FLAS 2023 website.

The Illinois COCONuts won first prize in the Core Track of the 2022 OpenCV AI Competition! This put us in the top 7 of 45 teams internationally! We developed a generalizable procedure for creating instance-aware wire detectors, since thin wires are typically challenging to detect using existing object detectors and conventional techniques from computer vision. Check out our pipeline below!

If at first you do not succeed, try again! After applying for a second time, I was awarded the Zonta International Amelia Earhart Fellowship in 2023! The application that made me an Amelia Earhart Fellowship finalist and the application that made me an Amelia Earhart recipient are distinct from each other. I am grateful Round #2 gave me the opportunity to sharpen my writing and clarify my vision for my Ph.D.

P.E.O. International is a philanthropic organization with a mission of helping women help women. While completing a master’s degree at Stanford, I reached out to Barbara Tonn, my coworker at NASA Marshall Space Flight Center and a member of the Huntsville P.E.O. Chapter. Barbara helped me obtain a low interest rate loan from P.E.O. to help fund my graduate studies. Once I learned more about P.E.O., I focused on their highest honor, the P.E.O. Scholar Award, presented to women selected through a highly competitive application process during the final two years of their doctoral programs. Finally earning the award felt like delayed gratification that I had truly earned! I was equally delighted to support my friend, Julia Di, as she applied for and received the same award the following year, too! I happily share my PEO Scholar Award Academic Program and Proposal Statement and my PEO Scholar Award Background Information Sheet and strongly encourage other women pursuing the Ph.D. in robotics-related fields to apply!

During the 2020-2021 academic year, I was a space cooperation delegate in the Stanford U.S.-Russia Forum. Over the course of the year, I studied the emerging commercial space ecosystems in the U.S. and Russia along with Jason Cornelius and Arzu Kurgan. We all traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia to present our work at the IAF Global Space Exploration Conference (GLEX) where it was a finalist for the Best Technical Presentation award! This was also the first conference I ever attended that used a palace as the venue!

I was awarded a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunity for 2021-2025! This award allowed me to pursue my self-directed research on representing and manipulating deformable linear objects in partnership with NASA. Perks include Visiting Technologist Experiences at NASA research centers which have a research match with my topic, regular check-ins with NASA robotics researchers to gain additional feedback on project directions, and budget for materials and travel.

July 2025 Post-Dissertation Defense and Deposit Update: The Ph.D. can be very difficult. Receiving the NSTGRO award was the best thing to happen to me during graduate school. It gave me access to some of the best roboticists in the world and allowed me develop independently as a leader, mentor, collaborator, and diplomat in ways no other source of funding could. I hope to see more roboticists grow through the NSTGRO program, so I am sharing my personal statement and project narrative. Ad astra!