Experience

Humanoid systems / learned control

WATonomous

Robotics Machine Learning Engineer to present Waterloo, Ontario
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Stairs up. Stairs down. Rough terrain.

I'm now training LEGR to climb and descend stairs and traverse rough terrain in Isaac Lab. This extends the flat-ground workflow into environments where the policy must adapt to changing geometry.

LEGR humanoid walking on flat terrain in NVIDIA Isaac Sim
Flat-ground LEGR policy / Isaac Sim Stair and rough-terrain training is in progress

My work starts before the first training run.

I build the simulation and reinforcement-learning workflow behind learned locomotion for the team's custom humanoid.

Before training, I validate the robot model, joint behavior, actuator dynamics, and contact sensing. I then build the Isaac Lab environments and shape rewards around the failures each policy exposes.

I train with PyTorch and RSL-RL across GPU-parallel environments, build focused diagnostics to separate model, physics, and policy issues, and work with the humanoid team to keep simulation aligned with the team's mechanical model.

Selected work.

  1. 01 June to July 2026 GPU-Accelerated Humanoid Locomotion Converted the custom 12-DOF lower body into a trainable Isaac Lab system and produced a repeatable walking policy from a fresh PPO run.
  2. 02 May to September 2026 Lidar-to-Control Navigation Built four C++ ROS 2 nodes for lidar mapping, A* planning, and closed-loop path following in Gazebo.

Python / PyTorch / NVIDIA Isaac Lab / RSL-RL / PPO / CUDA / C++ / ROS 2 / Gazebo / Foxglove