Harrison Bounds

Current Northwestern MS Robotics student with a graduation date of December 2025. Received my BS in Computer Science from the University of Central Arkansas in 2023.

I worked as a research assistant for one year at UCA advised by Dr.Emre Celebi. I also recently completed an internship as an autonomous robotics engineer at JLG working with visual SLAM and navigation.

My area of interests are Reinforcement Learning and Perception which are reflected in my projects below.

Resume  /  GitHub  /  LinkedIn   

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Projects

Doodle Droid GIF Bimanual Manipulation Challenge (1st place at ICRA)
Weize Li, Zhengxiao Han, Lixin Xu, Harrison Bounds, Chenrui Zhang, Yifan Xu

Paper

Teleoperated and trained a ARX humanoid robot to perform three different tasks for with bimanual manipulation: Fold a table cloth, open a container, and pick and place an object. Policy was trained using ACT, and competition was organized by Google Deepmind, RAI Institute, and other leading partners.

Hexapod Robot GIF Hexapod from Scratch with RL
Harrison Bounds

GitHub

Designed, constructed, and trained a locomotion policy for a six-legged robot to compare learned gaits to traditional ones. Programmed a tripod gait with inverse kinematics and bezier curves, while the reinforcement learning used PPO (Proximal Policy Optimization) and the Genesis Simulation platform.

Doodle Droid GIF Doodle Droid (Reposted by Franka Robotics)
Yanni Kechriotis, David Matthews, Harrison Bounds, Zhengxiao Han, Christian Tongate

GitHub

A 7-DoF Franka robot arm that adjusts its z-height using AprilTags, detects faces with an external camera, and generates portraits via line art. My core contribution involved leading the perception subsystem, utilizing ROS2, OpenCV, and Python to convert source images into detailed line drawings.

Robot Dog GIF Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks
Harrison Bounds, Sharwin Patil, Pushkar Dave

GitHub

Trained a Unitree Go2 robot dog in Genesis to perform diverse locomotion tasks, including walking, running, jumping, strafing, and stair climbing. Each specialized policy was developed using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with task-specific reward functions.

GPT-2 GPT-2 From Scratch
Harrison Bounds, *adapted from Andrej Karpathy,

GitHub

Created GPT-2's transformer from scratch adapting the source code from Andrej Karpathy's tutorials. Trained on 2 A6000 RTX GPUs with a total training time of 4 days. Evaluated results on hellaswag data retrieving an accuracy that beat the original model.

Modern Grasping Modern Grasping
Zhengxiao Han, Harrison Bounds

GitHub

Integrated a VLM (Vision-Lanugage Model) with SAM (Segment-Anything Model) to detect and mask arbitrary objects in a scene. This mask is overlayed onto the point cloud provided by a realsense RGBD camera and filters out grasping poses calculated from GraspNet.

Autonomous RC Car GIF Autonomous RC Car
Harrison Bounds, Brandon Donaldson, Lawan Hamidou, Lin Zhang

GitHub

Autonomous navigation system for an RC car using imitation learning built on a custom CNN (convolutional neural network).

Path Planner GIF Interactive Path Planning
Harrison Bounds, Logan Boswell

GitHub

Interactive path planning tool for navigating occupancy grids created by SLAM algorithms. Implemented the A* algorithm in C++ and integrated it with ROS2, allowing users to define start and goal points and visualize optimal paths in a simulated environment.

K-Means GIF K-Means Research
Harrison Bounds, Emre Celebi, Jordan Maxwell

GitHub

Implemented the Jancey K-Means algorithm in C++, comparing this lesser-known variant of K-Means to other popular widely used algorithms for clustering applications.

Sketch Prediction Sketch Prediction
Harrison Bounds, Sharwin Patil, Andrew Kwolek, Sayantani Bhattacharya

GitHub

Custom CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) that predicts a live drawing from a user over 250 unique classes.

Mobile Simulation Mobile Manipulation
Harrison Bounds

GitHub

Simulated a mobile Kuka robot in Coppelia Sim performing a manipulation task with a 4 DoF arm attached. Utilized trajectroy generation and PID control for smooth planning.

Path Planner GIF 2D Physics Simulator from Scratch
Harrison Bounds

GitHub

Simulated a jack in the box using Langragian dynamics and impact equations with Python and sympy.


Website template from Jon Barron.