Instructor Assistant - Autonomous Robotics and SLAM
I have been a teaching assistant for two courses at Michigan: Autonomous Robotics (Winter 2026) and SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping). In both, I run lab sessions, hold office hours, and help students with the same kind of material I learned not that long ago — motion planning, localization, control systems, and ROS. The Autonomous Robotics class is the one that goes deep on path planning and building robots that can navigate on their own; the SLAM class is the one I took in Fall 2024, so it is a bit surreal to be on the other side of it now.
The hardest part is not knowing the material — it is figuring out why a student's code or setup is broken when the error could be in the ROS config, the hardware, or something in between. A lot of office hours end up being debugging sessions where we go through the pipeline step by step. I also help with the labs themselves, which means making sure the robots and simulators are working before the students show up. It is a lot of the same skills I used at Kudan and on the Stryker project, just in a teaching context.