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Ethan Foong Hello! I am a senior undergraduate and master's student at Northwestern University, pursuing a BS in Computer Engineering and an MS in Computer Science through Northwestern's combined BS/MS program. At Northwestern, I conduct research at the HAND ERC advised by Prof. Kevin Lynch (working closely with Anunth Ramaswami), where I focus on curiosity-driven skill discovery and active learning from unstructured play for dexterous manipulation. In collaboration with Honda Research Institute, I have also developed tactile-responsive policies in simulation and transfered them to real robots for execution of high-force dexterous tasks, such as jar-lid twisting. Previously, I collaborated with Prof. Daniel Seita and Prof. Gaurav Sukhatme on HANDFUL (IROS 2026), a paper about learning of sequential, dexterous manipulation tasks where a robot must simultaneously execute multiple skills (grasp one object + push another) using a resource-aware grasp selection framework and curriculum learning. More broadly, I'm interested in three thrusts: developing sample-efficient algorithms and generalizable objectives that extract maximal signal from simulation and real-world collected data; capturing and embedding force, compliance, and tactile feedback to enable efficient learning and physical interaction grounding for fine manipulation tasks; and investigating autonomous goal-setting and execution diversity so robots can discover new skills and varied execution styles with minimal human supervision. 🎓 Seeking PhD positions for Fall 2027 Email / CV / Google Scholar / LinkedIn |
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Research(* indicates equal contribution, † indicates equal advising) |
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IROS
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HANDFUL: Sequential Grasp-Conditioned Dexterous Manipulation with Resource Awareness
Ethan Foong*, Yunshuang Li*, Hao Jiang, Gaurav Sukhatme, Daniel Seita IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2026 arXiv / project page / video / code HANDFUL tackles sequential grasp-conditioned dexterous manipulation tasks by treating finger use and in-hand space as a limited resource: learning resource-aware one and two-finger grasps and then leveraging the leftover fingers and in-hand space from grasping for downstream objectives like pressing a button, pulling a drawer, twisting a knob and pushing/picking up a second object. |
Service
Workshop reviewer: ICRA-2026 |
Awards
----Undergrad---- |
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Inspired by the template here. |