Leah Lee

My focus is 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.

I 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, fabricated, and tested GelSphere, with an under-review paper submitted to IROS 2026.

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 arXiv 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}, }

Projects

Smart Tool Wear and Breakage Detection via Servo Load Monitoring

Built an MLP in PyTorch to predict CNC tool flank wear from force, torque, vibration, and acoustic signals at 10 kHz. Designed feature engineering pipeline (88 features, NumPy/SciPy) and evaluated with k-fold cross-validation.

Jan 2026 – May 2026
Self-Actuated Climbing Inspection Robot

Designed and built a self-actuated surface inspection robot from scratch — system integration, CAD, embedded control (Arduino), suction-based adhesion, suspension design, and tactile sensing integration. Built test fixtures and iterated hardware to improve repeatability.

Aug 2025 – Present
Somansa: ZTNA Research and RAG System Development

Built Python automation tools for web crawling, PDF-to-Markdown and HTML-to-Markdown conversion, and data cleaning for AI ingestion. Developed a RAG pipeline with systematic LLM and embedding model evaluation across multiple configurations.

Jun 2025 – Aug 2025
Spherical GelSight Tactile Sensor

Developed a spherical vision-based tactile sensor for omnidirectional robotic surface scanning — sensor fabrication, PCB/electronics integration (ESP32S3), Python/OpenCV reconstruction pipeline. Patent filed; paper submitted to IROS 2026.

Feb 2025 – Present
ArachnoBot — Terrain-Adaptive Robot

Designed and built a terrain-adaptive walking robot with 4-bar linkage mechanism for stable locomotion over uneven surfaces. Rapid prototyping, mechanism design, and public demonstration to 1,000+ visitors. 1st Place, Distinguished Robotics.

Jan 2025 – May 2025
Assistive Technology Devices

Designed and 3D-printed assistive devices (vegetable slicer, bag closer, iPad holder) under one-handed usability, single-print fabrication, and safety constraints. CAD, rapid prototyping, and iterative user testing.

Aug 2024 – May 2025