hjsuh at mit dot edu
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Latest CV Update: 2024-01-03
Hyung Ju Terry Suh
Ph.D. candidate at MIT CSAIL
Advisor: Prof. Russ Tedrake at the Robot Locomotion Group.
Research Interest
My research interest lies in enabling robots with human-like dexterity and intelligence in manipulation. Through this technology I aim to broaden the spectrum of capabilities we have on automating physical tasks in the real world. To achieve this capability, I am searching for elegant solutions for perception, planning, and control through contact-rich dynamics that are frequent in real-world manipulation. In search of these solutions, I am broadly interested in bringing tools from rigorous model-based / mathematical disciplines (simulation, control, optimization, statistics) to understand, interpret, and improve recent empirical advances in machine learning (reinforcement learning, computer vision).
Background
I have previously spent summers in Boston Dynamics AI Institute (BDAI), Toyota Research Institute (TRI), and NASA JPL. Before joining MIT, I was an undergrad at Caltech (B.S. in Mech E and CS), with thesis advisors Joel Burdick, Aaron Ames, and Soon-Jo Chung. Even before then, I was a sergeant in the Korean army, and graduated from Korean Minjok Leadership Academy.
Recent Events
- 04/2024: Our Transactions on Robotics paper got Honorable Mention for 2023 T-RO King-Sun Fu Memorial Best Paper Award of the Year.
- 02/2024: Check out my interview with CSAIL Alliance!
- 10/2023: I am hosting a Workshop on Leveraging Models for Contact-Rich Manipulation at IROS 2023 with colleagues.
- 09/2023: I am organizing the MIT Embodied Intelligence Seminar.
- 08/2023: Our work on contact-rich manipulation is on MIT News!
- 07/2023: Our ICML paper got the IEEE RAS TC on Model-Based Optimization for Robotics 2022 Best Paper Award of the Year
- 06/2023: I started my internship at Boston Dynamics AI Institute with Tao Pang and Jiuguang Wang.
- 09/2022: Our work on Series Elastic End Effectors is on MIT News!
- 07/2022: Our paper on differentiable simulators got Outstanding Paper Award at ICML 2022! See my talk here!
- 09/2020: I am TAing a class on Robotic Manipulation this term (MIT 6.881)
- 06/2020: I am doing an internship at Toyota Research Institute: Robotics for the summer in the manipulation team, with Naveen Kuppuswamy.
Research
Fighting Uncertainty with Gradients: Offline Reinforcement Learning via Diffusion Score Matching
Global Planning for Contact-Rich Manipulation via Local Smoothing of Quasidynamic Contact Models
Do Differentiable Simulators Give Better Policy Gradients?
- H.J. Terry Suh, Max Simchowitz, Kaiqing Zhang, Russ Tedrake,
Do Differentiable Simulators Give Better Policy Gradients? [pdf][talk][code]
2022 International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML),
ICML Outstanding Paper Award
IEEE RAS TC on Model-based Optimization for Robotics 2022 Best Paper Award of the Year - H.J. Terry Suh, Max Simchowitz, Kaiqing Zhang, Tao Pang, Russ Tedrake,
Pathologies and Challenges of Using Differentiable Simulators in Policy Optimization for Contact-Rich Manipulation [pdf]
ICRA 2022 Workshop: Reinforcement Learning for Contact-Rich Manipulation
SEED: Series Elastic End-Effectors in 6D For Visuotactile Tool Use
- H.J. Terry Suh, Naveen Kuppuswamy, Tao Pang, Alex Alspach, Paul Mitiguy, Russ Tedrake,
SEED: Series Elastic End-Effectors in 6D For Visuotactile Tool Use [pdf][video][news]
2022 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) - H.J. Terry Suh, Naveen Kuppuswamy, Tao Pang, Alex Alspach, Paul Mitiguy, Russ Tedrake,
SEED: Series Elastic End-Effectors in 6D For Compliant Visuotactile Tool Use [pdf]
2022 ICRA Workshop: Compliant Robot Manipulation: Challenges and New Opportunities.
The Surprising Effectiveness of Linear Models for Visual Foresight in Object Pile Manipulation
- H.J. Terry Suh, Russ Tedrake,
The Surprising Effectiveness of Linear Models for Visual Foresight in Object Pile Manipulation [pdf][video]
2020 International Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics (WAFR) - H.J. Terry. Suh,
Predictive Models for Visuomotor Feedback Control in Object Pile Manipulation [pdf]
MIT Thesis, S.M. degree
Hybrid Locomotion
- H.J. Terry Suh, Xiaobin Xiong, Andrew Singletary, Aaron Ames, Joel Burdick,
Energy-Efficient Motion Planning for Multi-Modal Hybrid Locomotion [pdf][video]
2020 International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) - H.J. Terry Suh, Design and Planning of Flying-Driving Hybrid Robot [pdf][video]
Bachelor’s Thesis, California Institute of Technology, 2019
Semantic Task Planning with Temporal Logic Synthesis
- H.J. Terry Suh,
Semantic Task Planning in Household Environments using Temporal Logic Synthesis [pdf]
Self-hosted, 2018.
Vehicle Telelop with Impedance Controlled Manipulator
- H.J. Terry Suh, Peter Renn, Qifan Wang, Neha Sunil,
Manipulator-based Haptic Controller for Car-like Vehicles [pdf]
Self-hosted, 2018.
Fast Path Planner for Car-like Nonholonomic Vehicles
- H.J. Terry Suh, James Deacon, Qifan Wang,
A Fast PRM Planner for Car-like Vehicles [pdf]
Self-hosted, 2018.
Visual-Inertial SLAM with high-dimensional features
- H.J. Terry Suh,
Inertial-aided Normal Estimation for Planar Feature Mapping: Unique Solutions to Homography Decomposition [pdf]
Self-hosted, 2018.
Design of an Anthropomorphic Arm with Linear Actuators
- H.J. Terry Suh, James Deacon, Hana Keller,
Design of an Anthropomorphic Closed-loop Chain Manipulator [pdf]
Self-hosted, 2017.
Humanoid-Oriented Movement Writing
- A. Stoica, H.J.T. Suh, S.M.Hewitt, S. Bechtle, A. Gruebler, Y. Iwashita,
Towards a Humanoid-Oriented Movement Writing [pdf]
2017 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (SMC)
Intelligent Bear Robot that Learns Emotions
- H.J.T. Suh, W.S. Lee, J.H. Seo,
Design of an Intelligent Bear Robot with Emotional Learning Capabilities for Enhanced Human-robot Interaction [pdf]
Self-hosted, 2014.
My Robots
A few people have the pleasure of designing and entire robot from scratch. It takes long hours and incredible effort to build one, but the joy of seeing it move and perform is quite incomparable to anything else. When you design and make a robot, you create some form of life; and no matter how primitive it is, you are its creator. I always imagine its blood pumping through the red and black power wires, and its brain running basic thoughts in a metal computer.
The robots I made and designed have a very special place in my heart, for I am like their father.
The Drivocopter
The Drivocopter was a hardware platform I built for my undergraduate thesis, funded by JPL / Caltech team’s entry in DARPA’s Subterranean challenge. It is a robot that is designed to have both driving and flying capabilities. It’s the biggest hardware project that took an year for me and the Caltech ME/EE/CS75 team to design, build, iterate, and test under guidance from Prof. Joel Burdick.
It survived many interesting crashes. I accidentally drove it into a pond one time, and a bad landing maneuver once broke all of its leg.
Here are some cool videos of the Drivocopter! [video1][video2]
Saber II: Offroad Autonomous Driving Platform
Saber was a off-road reconnaissance robot that a team of researchers at JPL were building with Dr. Adrian Stoica as the lead. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to finish the project due to couple hiccups right before the deadline.
I took my favorite RC car and rebooted the concept to make Saber II (though it’s missing many expensive sensors as this was a self-funded project). It uses the Traxxas X-Maxx chassis, and has an NVidia TX-2 as the central computer.
HARP: Home Autonomous Robotic Platform
HARP was my experiment with building a mobile platform for home robots. I never built anything of this scale (full-human size) before, so there were many interesting design (and cost!) challenges there.
Although I was never able to finish HARP, I have a video of its brief operation. [video]
The Ring of Fire: Drogon, Rhaegal, and Viserion
These skid-steer tank robots were built as a part Caltech’s ME72, a mechanical engineering capstone course taught by Dr. Michael Mello. Our team name was “Ring of Fire”, with members Cormac O’Neill (now a fellow grad student at MIT!), James Deacon, and Hana Keller. I was watching Game of Thrones at the time, which explains the robot names (there were three identical ones).
This is when I started to seriously delve into mechanical design, and remember spending many all-nighters trying to fix tons of failure modes. I’ll never forget the night I was pulling off an all nighter with Cormac to work on one of these robots, and one of the on-board regulators suddenly blew up in a puff of unhealthy-smelling smoke!
Ultrasound Tracking Fanboat
Music
If you’re interested, check out my Soundcloud Page! (Though the last serious recording I made was in 2016)