Muchen Sun
Ph.D. Candidate
Evanston, Illinois, United States
Summary
👤
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.
9 years of coding experience
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mechanical Engineering, Doctor of Philosophy - PhD, Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern UniversityKellogg School of Management
Github Skills (13)
coupling7
crowd6
pose2
optimization2
sparse2
gaussian2
regression1
computer-vision1
machine-learning1
stochastic-processes1
pose-estimation1
react1
gaussian-processes1
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
MurpheyLab/DistNav
Jul 2021 - Apr 2022
Official repository for the paper "Move Beyond Trajectories: Distribution Space Coupling for Crowd Navigation"
Contributions:21 commits, 10 PRs, 9 pushes in 9 months
couplingcrowdbeyondtrajectoriesdistribution
MurpheyLab/MurpheyLab.github.io
Aug 2021 - Nov 2024
Contributions:15 PRs, 59 pushes in 3 years 4 months
emergentjavascriptlab-websiteautonomylab
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.