Robotics MS · UC San Diego
Nathan Van Utrecht
I work on perception and robot learning. Right now I'm in Xiaolong Wang's lab, co-designing dexterous hands and the policies that drive them, from simulation to a real Rubik's Cube solve.
Before this: internships at Brain Corp, John Deere, and Grace Technologies, and two research positions at Iowa State.
Live: frontier exploration, A* planning, 2D lidar. Click to set a goal.
Toolkit
What I reach for
- Estimation & SLAM
- EKF, factor graphs (GTSAM), bundle adjustment, ICP, camera calibration
- AI evaluation
- Golden datasets, commit-pinned eval runs, regression diffs, agent harnesses
- Robot learning
- PPO, SAC, BC / GAIL / AIRL, sim-to-real, PyTorch, Gymnasium
- Perception
- Multi-camera geometry, stereo depth, lidar fusion, YOLOv8, CNNs, ViTs
- Planning & control
- Kinematics, trajectory planning, Koopman models, ROS
Work
11 projects, 2023 to 2026
-
Pixels to meters: pallet mapping Projects each barcode read from a 4-camera tower onto the rack face in world coordinates, replacing pixel heuristics. Precision rose 0.33 → 0.93 at 100% recall, and it is now live at 10+ customer sites. Multi-camera geometry, calibration, pose graphs Perception 2026 -
AI hill-climbing on a robot perception pipeline Coding agents propose a change, run the real pipeline pinned to that commit, and score it against a 25k-label golden set. The loop found the association change that shipped to production. LLM agents, golden datasets, regression diffs Learning 2026 -
Visual-inertial SLAM A joint EKF on SE(3) that fuses IMU kinematics with optical-flow stereo features, bounding the drift of IMU-only dead reckoning on a Clearpath Jackal. EKF, sensor fusion, stereo vision Estimation 2026 -
LiDAR SLAM with factor graphs Odometry, ICP scan matching, and GTSAM pose-graph optimization. Proximity-based loop closures cut total graph error 65%, against 43% for fixed-interval ones. GTSAM, ICP, pose graphs Estimation 2026 -
Mobile manipulator pick-and-place Kinematics, 8-segment screw trajectories, and a feedforward + PI controller for a KUKA youBot. End-effector error converges within 5 s with little to no overshoot. Kinematics, trajectory planning, CoppeliaSim Control 2026 -
Koopman models with KANs Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks as learned Koopman observables for a soft robot arm. Needs under half the training data of a polynomial EDMD baseline and runs in ~2 ms. PyTorch, Koopman operators, soft robotics Learning 2025 -
IMU orientation tracking & panoramas Projected gradient descent over unit quaternions tracks IMU orientation against VICON ground truth, then stitches camera frames into a 2048×1536 panorama. Quaternions, constrained optimization Estimation 2026 -
F1Tenth autonomous racing A follow-the-gap planner on raw LiDAR that laps the Nürburgring in the F1Tenth simulator, with separate fast and smooth modes. ROS, LiDAR, reactive planning Control 2023 -
PPO from scratch Proximal Policy Optimization written in PyTorch and trained on Gymnasium tasks from CartPole and LunarLander to MuJoCo Hopper and HalfCheetah, matching Stable-Baselines3 on 5 benchmarks. PyTorch, Gymnasium Learning 2024 -
Basketball shot detection YOLOv8 and segmentation track the ball, and a fitted trajectory calls make or miss. YOLOv8, transfer learning Perception 2024 -
Traffic signs under occlusion Five models compared on occluded signs. A small custom CNN hit 95.9% accuracy at 1 ms per image; ResNet-50 reached 98.2% but ran 4.6× slower. CNNs, ViTs, data augmentation Perception 2024
Experience
3 research, 3 industry
| Date | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2026 – now | Xiaolong Wang Lab Graduate student researcher, UC San Diego Research | Co-designing dexterous hands and policies for Rubik's Cube solving on an Amazon-sponsored project. One JAX PPO policy covers 2,048 generated hand designs, and on hardware the physical hand solved a scrambled cube. |
| 2026 | Brain Corp Software engineering intern, San Diego Industry | Shipped metric world-coordinate association for a warehouse robot's 4-camera perception pipeline: precision rose 0.33 → 0.93 at full recall, live at 10+ customer sites. Built the 25k-label eval platform and the harness that let AI coding agents hill-climb it, plus a bundle-adjustment stitcher 48× faster than the existing one. |
| 2023 – 25 | Coordinated Systems Lab Undergraduate researcher, Iowa State Research | Stress-tested BC, GAIL, and AIRL under shifted physics and goals; AIRL beat direct imitation by 140%+ on transfer tasks. Wrote it up as my honors thesis. |
| 2024 | TrAC REU REU researcher, Iowa State Research | Benchmarked model-based and model-free RL for sim-to-real. SAC converged 5× faster than SHAC and was more robust to noise. |
| 2023 | John Deere Product engineering intern, Augusta, GA Industry | Took a tool-storage bracket from Creo concept to physical test; FEA and topology optimization cut its weight 25%. Four CAD concepts for new tractor cab features. |
| 2022 – 23 | Grace Technologies Software engineering intern, Davenport, IA Industry | Six Python validation suites (>80% less manual testing, coverage 60% → 95%) and a field debugger that cut troubleshooting from 45 to under 10 minutes and callbacks 40%. |
Education
2 degrees
| Date | Where | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 2025 – 27 | UC San Diego San Diego, CA | M.S. Intelligent Systems, Robotics, and Control Expected June 2027. |
| 2021 – 25 | Iowa State University Ames, IA | B.S. Mechanical Engineering, minor in Cyber Physical Systems GPA 3.98/4.00, summa cum laude, University Honors Program, Tau Beta Pi. |