CV

Education

• Ph.D. in Robotics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2025
• M.S. in Robotics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 2024
• B.S. in Mechanical Engineering, Florida International University, 2020 (Summa Cum Laude)

Work Experience

• June 2020 – March 2025: Graduate Student Researcher (Fellowship-Funded)
  • University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
  • Manipulation and Mechanisms Intelligence Laboratory MMINT
  • Supervisor: Nima Fazeli
• June 2021 – August 2021: Intern
  • Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee
  • Manufacturing Division
  • Advisor: Peter Wang
• Sep 2019 – Jul 2020: Undergraduate Researcher
  • Florida International University, Florida
  • Applied Research Center
  • Advisor: Anthony Abrahao
• May 2019 – Aug 2019: Undergraduate Researcher, Summer Research Internship
  • University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
  • POETS Research Center
  • Advisor: James Allison

Publications

Cross-Sensor Touch Generation

Samanta Rodriguez*, Yiming Dou*, Miquel Oller, Andrew Owens, Nima Fazeli
9th Conference on Robotic Learning (CoRL), 2025

Contrastive Touch-to-Touch Pretraining (CTTP)

Samanta Rodriguez*, Yiming Dou*, William van den Bogert, Miquel Oller, Kevin So, Andrew Owens, Nima Fazeli
International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025

Touch2Touch: Cross-Modal Tactile Generation for Object Manipulation

Samanta Rodriguez*, Yiming Do*u, Miquel Oller, Andrew Owens, Nima Fazeli
Preprint, 2024

Reviewing

• Primary Reviewer: ICRA (2024, 2025), CoRL (2025), RA-L (2025)

Mentoring

• Chitrangada Devulapalli (2025) – Master’s student in Robotics, University of Michigan
• Kevin So (2023) – Master’s student in Robotics, University of Michigan
• Dereck Fermin Oliveras (2022) – Master’s student in Robotics, University of Michigan

Leadership & Service

• Officer, Robotics Graduate Student Council (RGSC) — 2022–2024
• Member, DEI/RCE Committee, Robotics Department — 2022–2024

Awards & Scholarships

• NSF Graduate Research Fellowship (GRFP) — 2021–2026
• GEM Fellowship — 2021–2026
• Rackham Presidential Graduate Fellowship, University of Michigan — 2022
• Outstanding Graduate Student in Mechanical Engineering, FIU — 2020
• Winner, International Atomic Energy Agency Challenge — 2020
• NSF SURP Fellowship, POETS Research Center — 2019

Skills

Hardware: KUKA LBR iiwa Med R820, DIGIT, GelSlim, GelSight, TRI Soft Bubble, Intel RealSense, ATI F/T sensor
Programming: Python, MATLAB
Languages: Spanish (native), English (fluent)