what about me
I’m Kurtis
Currently, a CS student at Simon Fraser University and a robotics research assistant in the MARS (Multi-Agent Robotic Systems) Lab, supervised by Prof. Mo Chen, where I work on multi-agent robotic safety, Hamilton–Jacobi reachability, and model predictive control. My work tends to start from theory (reachability, critics, planners) and end with something that actually runs; whether that’s a JAX-accelerated MPPI controller (multi-agent-mppi) rolling out trajectories on a GPU, or multiple differential-drive robots executing safety-aware policies.
At this very moment, I’m interested in making formal verification-based safety (i.e. HJ) learnable online, with some robustness and anti-forgetting mechanisms. so that embodied, reset-limited robots can adapt their safety structure over time without losing rigorous safety and liveness guarantees.
More broadly, I’m also interested in RL-based control and computer vision, since believing that a single method can address all problems is a fallacy
;).
I also dabbled on the biomedical side! I am grateful to have worked with Prof. Ghassan Hamarneh and his former postdoc student, Dr. Ben Cardoen (a super cool guy!), in SFU’s MAI (Medical Image Analysis) Lab, building physics-aware 3D SMLM simulators and workflows for protein structure recovery, as well as tooling for Federated Learning on bimodal data and HPC.
Publications & Works
\(\triangleright\) K. K. Yang, G. Lee, N. Jahanshahi, and M. Chen. “Dynamics-Aware Buffered Time-to-Reach Collision Avoidance using Hamilton–Jacobi Reachability.” Preprint, to be submitted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025.