Samuel Chua

Hello! My name is Samuel Chua, and I am a Robotics Masters student in the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania. I am advised by Vijay Kumar and Camillo J. Taylor. I believe in exploring the unknown and very much enjoy the thrill of learning through curiosity!

My research interests are in Perception-based Autonomy, Semantic Reasoning and Foundational Models for robots. I am interested in leveraging foundational models for robot task planning and autonomous exploration, enabling closed-loop autonomy through reasoning and acting in unstructured environments.

I was an AI Infrastructure intern at LinkedIn on the Information Retrieval Platform (IRP) team, which my work supported search, retrieval, ranking, and ML model serving at production scale. I was a SDE intern at Amazon with the Foundational People Data Services (FPDS) team and worked on a centralized AWS DynamoDB data transformation mechanism to generate real-time data representations.

I received my B.S. in Computer Science & Engineering from UCLA in 2025. I worked with Professor Brett Lopez in VECTR Lab on SLAM and change detection and with Professor Ankur Mehta in LEMUR Lab on Deep Reinforcement Learning. I had multiple internship stints with DSO National Laboratories, particularly with the Robotics Autonomy Lab led by Lionel Heng, where I worked on Degeneracy-aware LiDAR-Inertial Odometry and Viewpoint Generation.