⊕ Record / 11 · Academic · WPI Labs · Starting 2026

Research.

Starting undergraduate-style research at Worcester Polytechnic Institute across two labs — one in medical devices & advanced manufacturing, one in autonomous robotics & perception.

Incoming Researcher Mentors: Prof. Yihao Zheng · Prof. Nitin J. Sanket
⊕ Institution
WPI
⊕ Labs
02
⊕ Fields
MED+ RBE
⊕ Start
2026

Worcester Polytechnic Institute sits twenty minutes from my bench, and it is one of the densest concentrations of applied-engineering research in the region. I’m beginning research there with two faculty whose work maps almost exactly onto what I already build.

Prof. Yihao Zheng works at the intersection of medical devices and advanced manufacturing — the hardware, tolerances, and fabrication side. Prof. Nitin J. Sanket runs one of the leading labs on perception and autonomy for tiny robots — the controls and software side that the FRC work points toward.

Together they cover both halves of how I think about building things: make the physical thing precise, and make it think for itself.

⊕ The Labs / Two Mentors

Where The Work Happens

⊕ Lab 01 · MedMan ⊕ Higgins Labs · Mechanical & Materials Eng.
⊕ Principal Investigator

Prof. Yihao Zheng

MedMan Lab — Medical & Manufacturing Innovation
Assistant Professor · Mechanical & Materials Engineering, WPI

Zheng’s lab builds medical devices and the advanced manufacturing processes behind them, working from a “hospital-factory” analogy — treating human tissue machining with the same rigor as a production line.

His group recently won a ~$1.2M NSF grant to develop an AI-enabled fiber-optic probe that reads a brain clot’s stiffness in real time, helping surgeons choose how to remove it during a thrombectomy. He’s an inventor on four medical-device patents that spun out three companies.

⊕ Field
Medical devices · surgical robotics · advanced manufacturing
⊕ Themes
Medical & manufacturing innovation · smart health · human-centered convergence
⊕ Flagship
Fiber-optic clot-sensing probe for stroke treatment (NSF-funded)
Medical DevicesManufacturingSurgical RoboticsSmart Health
⊕ Lab 02 · PeAR ⊕ Unity Hall · Robotics Engineering Dept.
⊕ Principal Investigator

Prof. Nitin J. Sanket

PeAR — Perception & Autonomous Robotics Group (est. 2022)
Assistant Professor · Robotics Engineering, WPI

PeAR tackles perception and autonomy on extremely resource-constrained tiny robots — nano-drones that navigate using only onboard cameras, inertial sensors, and computation, with no GPS or external motion-capture. Sanket calls the approach “Minimal-AI.”

The lab is known for “RoboBees” — palm-sized pollinator drones — and NSF-funded work on acoustic navigation that lets a drone fly through smoke, fog, and darkness for search-and-rescue, inspired by how bats hear.

⊕ Field
Robot perception · autonomy · agile aerial robotics
⊕ Approach
Minimal-AI · active & interactive perception · deep compression
⊕ Flagship
RoboBees & acoustic search-and-rescue nano-drones
Computer VisionNano-DronesAutonomyDeep Learning

The Through-Line

I’ve spent years on both ends of a build — fabricating physical hardware (3D printing, the DC power prototype, phone repair) and writing the software that controls it (FRC robotics, web platforms). These two labs are the academic versions of those instincts.

Zheng’s side sharpens the manufacturing-and-medical-hardware half: precision, tolerances, and devices that have to work the first time inside a human body. Sanket’s side sharpens the autonomy half: making small machines perceive and decide on their own, under tight compute and power budgets — the exact constraints I hit on the robot and the DC prototype.

The plan is to learn how real research is scoped and run, contribute where I can, and bring the rigor back to the projects in this index.

Related Work

⊕ N° 03

FRC Robotics

Robotics · Java · 2024 – 2026→
⊕ N° 02

48V DC Residential

Hardware · Patent · 2025→
⊕ N° 10

School · AP

Academics · Honors · 2023 – 2027→
← Previous · N° 10
School · AP
Next · Build Log →
All Work