Paula Contreras

A companion robot for patients and caregivers. When someone walks in, Pepper recognizes them, says hello, checks in, and offers an activity: Simon Says, a guess-the-object game, or a seated exercise routine. All the AI runs locally on a Jetson attached to a robot that is more than ten years old.

• Live video from the robot to the Jetson, with YOLOv8 object detection and local face recognition (SCRFD + AuraFace).
• Root-caused corrupted camera frames to YUV422 decoding, and a torchvision::nms crash to a CUDA kernel missing from Jetson's aarch64 build.
• Pepper refused to go through doorways. The fix was smaller steps, not a bigger push.
• Bridged Pepper's navigation to ROS 2 / Nav2; tested with pytest plus a hardware-in-the-loop checklist.

A shopping assistant that picks items off supermarket shelves: a UR5 arm with a Robotiq 2F-85 gripper on a 4-wheel cart. It grasps using only two fingertip contact sensors, with no camera in the loop.

• Reactive grasp state machine: when only one finger touches the can, the gripper shifts toward that side to re-center before closing and lifting.
• 3-level LiDAR safety filter for teleoperation (emergency stop, directional hard stops, slow zones) that fails safe to zero velocity if the scan drops.
• PyQt5 operator GUI and a one-command bring-up with 7 Docker Compose services.

A TurtleBot 3 that hears you, turns toward you and comes over. Built in Ecuador and published at the IEEE Ecuador Technical Chapters Meeting. It's the robot behind the little animation at the top of this page.

• Sound source localization with a 4-microphone array: voice activity detection plus GCC-PHAT direction of arrival, feeding a PID heading controller.
• Custom C++ firmware on the OpenCR board stops the robot at a cliff on the microcontroller itself, before ROS ever sees the message.

A closed loop where a language model writes C/C++ hardware policies, a simulator benchmarks them, and the results go back to the model so it improves the next version, with no hand-tuning in between. This is the project that made me forget to sleep, and the loop I want to bring to robots next.

• Cache replacement policy: +10.41% over baseline across 5 industry-standard workloads.
• L1 instruction prefetcher (IPC-1 framework): IPC from 0.950 to 0.981.

Bare-metal C firmware for an ESP32 that controls a TRIAC, drives a DC motor with PWM and reads several sensors, on two boards I designed. The faults were found with an oscilloscope, one signal at a time.