Muchen Sun
Ph.D. Candidate
Evanston, Illinois, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolMuchen Sun is a Ph.D. candidate at Northwestern University specializing in robotics, AI, and mechanical engineering with nine years of hands-on experience building perception, planning, and learning systems for embodied agents. His research develops variational and kernel-based methods for decision-making under uncertainty, applied to problems like human-aware robot navigation, autonomous exploration on Lie groups, and soft-robot locomotion. He has turned theory into real-time systems—implementing scale-invariant point-cloud registration and on-board learning algorithms in C++ and deploying PyTorch models on embedded platforms such as Jetson AGX Orin and Unitree robots. Muchen blends research with teaching and mentorship, helping design active-learning curricula while advising students and managing lab infrastructure. Uncommonly for an academic, he has substantial industry collaboration experience, including large-scale field deployments and joint grant work with Honda Research Institute.
10 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern UniversityKellogg School of Management
Github Skills (24)
trajectory-optimization9
ceres-solver8
robotics7
gaussian-processes7
eigen7
motion-planning7
point-cloud5
gpu5
game-theory5
variational-autoencoder5
rss5
javascript4
python4
cpp4
generative-model4
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
MurpheyLab/MurpheyLab.github.io
Aug 2021 - Jul 2025
Interactive and Emergent Autonomy Lab Website
Contributions:16 PRs, 64 pushes in 4 years
emergentjavascriptlab-websiteautonomylab
MurpheyLab/DistNav
Jul 2021 - Apr 2022
(RSS 2021) Move Beyond Trajectories: Distribution Space Coupling for Crowd Navigation
Contributions:21 commits, 10 PRs, 9 pushes in 9 months
rsscrowd-navigationeth-datasetgaussian-processeshuman-robot-interaction
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