Tarik Tosun

Welcome to my site!

I’m a roboticist and machine learning engineer, currently working as part of the Waymo ML Planner team in New York City.

Previously, I was a Research Scientist at the New York Samsung AI Center, where I worked on deep learning for robotic manipulation.

I did my Ph.D in Mechanical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania with Mark Yim in ModLab, part of the GRASP Lab. During my Ph.D, I developed robots that can transform between different shapes (like a car, snake, or arm) and build structures.

Featured Research

Pixels to Plans

We present a novel method enabling robots to quickly learn to manipulate objects by leveraging a motion planner to generate “expert” training trajectories from a small amount of human-labeled data. In contrast to the traditional sense-plan-act cycle, we propose a deep learning architecture and training regimen called PtPNet that can ...
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Autonomous Modular Robots

Science Robotics, 2018. The theoretical ability of modular robots to reconfigure in response to complex tasks in a priori unknown environments has frequently been cited as an advantage and remains a major motivator for work in the field. We present a modular robot system capable of autonomously completing high-level tasks by ...
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Environment Augmentation with Modular Robots

Featured on IEEE Spectrum and TechCrunch! We present a system enabling a modular robot to autonomously build structures in order to accomplish high-level tasks. Building structures allows the robot to surmount large obstacles, expanding the set of tasks it can perform. This addresses a common weakness of modular robot systems, ...
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SMORES-EP

SMORES-EP is a modular robot designed and built at the University of Pennsylvania, and used by researchers at Penn and Cornell. SMORES stands for Self-Assembling MOdular Robot for Extreme Shapeshifting, and EP refers to the Electro-Permanent magnets the modules use to connect ...
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