- Full-stack ownership of a mobile robot platform, with primary focus on developing RSL-RL policies to replace a model-based QP/IK posture controller, closing the sim-to-real gap and validating outdoors on untrained terrain.
- Benchmarked reactive, recurrent and teacher-distilled architectures under one reward and observation contract; direct RL trained the recurrent policy to deployment without the two-stage distillation pipeline, cutting a stage from the standard approach.
I'm a first-year M.S. student in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon, advised by Professor Aaron M. Johnson in the Robomechanics Lab.
I build minimally-actuated bipedal robots that walk in the real world. Right now, I'm working on a penguin-inspired biped for low-friction slopes and Mugatu, the first steerable single-motor biped. I'm targeting ICRA 2027 as co-first author. In 2026 summer, I'm joining a stealth AI company as a Physical AI intern.
Research Statement
I want to understand how morphology and control can be co-designed so that simple, low-cost legged robots walk robustly outside the lab. I start from biology and physics to extract the minimal mechanism that makes a gait work, then close the loop with reinforcement learning in simulation and transfer policies to hardware. The goal is a tighter design pipeline from animal observation to walking machine, where the mechanism does half the work and the controller does the rest.
This work has been shaped by the guidance of my advisor, Professor Aaron M. Johnson, and years of close mentorship from Ph.D. candidates Naomi Oke and Steven Man.
News
Experience
Ongoing Research

A 5-DOF bipedal robot with a crank-link leg extension that captures macaroni penguin inertial properties. Currently training with a CPG-RL framework for stable, biomimetic walking on viscous, slippery, and sloped surfaces.
→ Co-first-author workshop at ICRA 2026
→ Featured at NFL Draft Tech Demo Day 2026
The first steerable single-motor biped. I built a PID attitude controller for directional control and analyzed 2D contact dynamics to optimize gait efficiency and limit-cycle stability.
→ GRC Robotics 2026 · NCUR 2025 · CMU MOTM 2025
Projects

A PPO policy in Isaac Lab for adaptive wheel-leg switching on the Unitree Go2-W, trained on procedurally-generated off-road terrains with multi-crop row constraints.

Real-time MPPI controller for a 17-state quadrotor model, sampling control inputs in PyBullet to balance high velocity against aggressive gate navigation.
PPO with 4096 parallel agents and an exponentially-scaled curriculum for precision landing on moving targets. 96% success rate on Crazyflie 2.1+ hardware with <4 cm error.
An RL + LQR controller for seamless transitions between 3 gaits within 2 seconds, using contact-implicit trajectory optimization in MuJoCo.

Designed, CAD-modeled, simulated, and fabricated a PAM-enhanced suspension system with mode-switching and feedback control. Collected experimental data validating variable stiffness across loading conditions.
Publications
Selected Media


Contact
The fastest way to reach me is email: bengu [at] andrew.cmu.edu. I'm always happy to chat about legged robots, RL, or sim-to-real.
