Big news from the UW College of Engineering: our new Master of Science in Robotics and Graduate Certificate in Applied Robotics are officially launching this fall! It’s been a joy to help build something from the ground up with such a talented group of colleagues across the college of engineering and departments.
It’s been a great year for the group so far. Here’s a roundup of 11 new papers (plus a granted patent!) from the lab published or accepted in 2026, spanning robotics, manufacturing, and control venues.
On August 7, 2026, colleagues, collaborators, and more than 100 academic “descendants” gathered at UC Berkeley for the Mechanical Systems Control Workshop — better known to everyone in the room as Tomizuka Fest — a day-long tribute to Professor Masayoshi Tomizuka’s half-century of scholarship, teaching, and mentorship on the occasion of his 80th birthday.
When three Presidents of the American Society for Precision Engineering (ASPE) gather in one room, the conversation moves from simple measurements to the future of systems thinking. It was a privilege to host Dr. Stuart T. Smith (UNC Charlotte) at the University of Washington for his seminar, “Precision Instruments and Machines along the Mechatronics Road.”
We’re excited to share our latest work, “iLSPR: a learning-based scene point-cloud registration method for robotic spatial awareness in intelligent manufacturing,” by Yusen Wan and Xu Chen, now published in Robotics and Computer-Integrated Manufacturing (Vol. 99, 2026). This publication marks an important step toward enabling robots to achieve high-precision spatial awareness in real-world industrial environments—where accuracy matters most and data is often scarce.
It all began with a single glance in the crowd. My mentorship journey with Toby has been a truly unique story. When Toby first joined the group, he wasn’t someone rushing headlong into the world of robotics. He simply wanted to make his master’s experience more meaningful, to add weight to the journey. So I chose a mathematically inclined project for us to explore together-starting from fundamentals, seeking depth over speed.
From snowboarding examples to fully reworked lecture materials, it has been a blast with the students.
🌟 Every project, every journey, is a precious treasure. 💎 Every student, every class, is an invaluable gem. This year, I’ve started to carefully reflect on and organize these treasures and gems—each representing a milestone of growth and learning.
