Tom Gao

Hello!

I'm Ziming (Tom) Gao, a Computer Science undergraduate at University of Michigan. I'm currently working in the Lab for Progress with Prof. Chad Jenkins.

I major in Computer Science and minor in Electrical Engineering, but have been highly involved with the Robotics Institute. I helped develop the initial ROB 102: Introduction to AI and Programming course (now a part of the Distributed Teaching Collaborative as HelloRob) with Prof. Chad Jenkins and Jana Pavlasek, the ROB 310: Signals and Sensors course with Dr. Peter Gaskell, and have worked since on software development for the MBot.

I'm highly interested in further Computer Science/Robotics research with a focus on using transformer models. On the side, I'm an aspiring maker and enjoy using very different engineering tools (3D modeling and printing, schematic & PCB design, soldering, embedded programming, etc).

Publications

Stanley Lewis, Tom Gao, Nick Janne, and Odest Chadwicke Jenkins, “Inverting the Design of Everyday Things: Affordances, Signifiers and Why Objects Should See and Robots Should Do.” NeuRL-RMW: Workshop for Neural Representation Learning for Robot Manipulation @CoRL2023, (https://neurl-rmw.github.io/) (accepted for oral spotlight)

Peter Gaskell, Jana Pavlasek, Tom Gao, Abhishek Narula, Stanley Lewis, Odest Chadwicke Jenkins. “MBot: A Modular Ecosystem for Scalable Robotics Education”, submitted to ICRA 2024. [ArXiv preprint] (https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.00962)