I’m a PhD student at UC Irvine, studying robotics, computer science, and cognitive science. Currently, I’m interested in biologically inspired models of navigation and control for autonomous vehicles.
Below are a collection of projects encompassing the fields of robotics, computer science, and game development. When I can, I love combining elements of as many as possible!
EKF SLAM on Low Cost Robotic Platforms
This project aimed to test the capabilities of traditional simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms (SLAM) on cheap, accessible hardware. To this end, I implemented Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) SLAM from scratch on a robotic platform called OpenBot, which is 3D-printed and powered by an android phone. The robot has limited sensor capabilities in the form of a single beam sonar on the front, as well as wheel encoders for self motion estimation. SLAM was tested in simulation first (left) and then on real data (right).
Q-Learning for a Real-Life Acrobot Task
I built a real life version of the Acrobot task found on OpenAI’s Gym API using the (surprisingly powerful!) LEGO SPIKE robotic platform. This was used to test the capabilities of Q-Learning, a reinforcement learning algorithm, in an online setting. After 100 episodes the robot learned to use its momentum to gain height using successive forward and backward arm motions, and consistently performed a flip.
Spiking Wavefront Propagation in Unity
For this project, I wanted a way to better visualize the spiking wavefront propagation (SWP) model for path planning, as well as test out a method of place cell assignment based on the popular RRT algorithm. I created this simple simulation in Unity which can visualize place cell activation and report path length and total exploration time. You can follow the link below to try it out! (On some browsers it may not run well)
Spiking Wavefront Propagation by HCEspino
Take as Needed and Monastery
In the span of one summer, I worked with a group of artists, programmers, and writers to help develop Take as Needed, a story-driven puzzle game. Sales for the game go towards medical research and providing insulin. You can view the steam page here.
Following this, we created the game studio Chromeleon Games, and developed a demo for Monastery, a top-down platformer. You can find the demo for that game here.
Investigating Adversarial Attacks on Hyperdimensional Computing
For a final project, my group and I investigated how one would develop adversarial attacks on a hyperdimensional classifier, as in this paper. Using a genetic algorithm, images of the MNIST dataset were progressively perturbed to reduce the model’s accuracy.
Harrison Espino 