Taowei Huang

Taowei Huang

MS student in ECE at UIUC

Experience

Intelligent Motion Laboratory

June 2025 – Present

Undergraduate Research Assistant

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Champaign, IL

Advisor: Prof. Kris Hauser

Robot motion planning with MPPI control, GPU-accelerated simulation, and adaptive planning heuristics.

Research contributions — Intelligent Motion Laboratory
  • Designed and implemented a novel sampling strategy for Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI), increasing target-reaching success rate by 20% in cluttered dynamic environments.
  • Implemented GPU-parallel MPPI rollouts in MuJoCo Warp, achieving a 10× speedup over CPU-based simulation.
  • Integrated an online-learned heuristic map, inspired by Real-Time Adaptive A*, into MPPI, reducing the required escape planning horizon from 1.1 seconds to 0.2 seconds.

Coordinated Science Laboratory

May 2024 – May 2025

Undergraduate Research Assistant

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · Champaign, IL

Machine learning for spectral image reconstruction, combining neural networks with iterative optimization.

Research contributions — Coordinated Science Laboratory
  • Developed and trained neural networks in PyTorch to address nonlinear inverse problems in slitless instantaneous spectral imaging.
  • Engineered an optimization-inspired neural network architecture that surpassed UNet by 10% in reconstruction quality.
  • Integrated iterative optimization principles into the neural network architecture to improve robustness against input distribution shifts.