Leah Lee

My work focuses on development of mechanical systems. I am especially interested in taking a design from concept to working hardware, such as designing parts, fabricating, testing performance, and refining the system based on measured results.

On Illini Solar Car, I design and manufacture composite fairing door using 3D-printed tooling and carbon fiber/fiberglass layup. I also work on two research projects. At the Novel Mobile Robots Lab, I develop a self-actuated climbing inspection robot, working on mechanism design, system integration, and experimental testing. At the RoboTouch Lab, I designed, fabicated, and tested GelSphere, with an underreview paper submitted to IROS 2026.

News

Mar 02, 2026	Conference paper on GelSphere submitted to IROS 2026.
Aug 24, 2025	Joined the Novel Mobile Robots Lab, working on self-actuated climbing robot under Prof. Justin Yim.
May 10, 2025	ArachnoBot won 1st Place and Distinguished Robotics at ASME Engineering Open House, competing against 200+ exhibits.
Feb 01, 2025	Joined the RoboTouch Lab, working on Spherical Tactile Sensor under Prof. Wenzhen Yuan.

Selected Publications

GelSphere: An Omnidirectional Rolling Vision-Based Tactile Sensor for Online 3D Reconstruction and Normal Force Estimation

Seoyeon Lee^*, Mohammad Amin Mirzaee^*, and Wenzhen Yuan

In IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2026

Submitted. * equal contribution

Abs Bib Website

We present a spherical tactile sensor based on the GelSight principle, enabling omnidirectional contact geometry reconstruction. The sensor uses a novel spherical elastomer design with integrated illumination and a calibrated photometric stereo pipeline for surface normal estimation.
@inproceedings{lee2026spherical, title = {GelSphere: An Omnidirectional Rolling Vision-Based Tactile Sensor for Online 3D Reconstruction and Normal Force Estimation}, author = {Lee, Seoyeon and Mirzaee, Mohammad Amin and Yuan, Wenzhen}, booktitle = {IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)}, year = {2026}, note = {Submitted. * equal contribution}, }