Samuel Lau

I am an Engineering Physics student at UBC, working on the boundary between theory and physical systems. I am particularly interested in making robots behave: State estimation, controls, robot software, and navigation etc. I find these fields tremendously interesting as they blend in cool knowledge like probabilities, physics, linear algebra, and calculus.

Engineering Physics developed my software, mechanical, and electrical skills as one integrated skillset rather than three separate ones. That cross-disciplinary fluency is what lets me find solutions at the intersection of all three. The math- and physics-heavy coursework built a different asset: physical intuition sharp enough to reason naturally about how a robot perceives its environment and how it should act in response.

I built most of my technical skills through design teams and personal projects. Last year, I joined UBC Thunderbots. We build a fleet of autonomous soccer-playing robots that compete in global tournaments. This year, I serve as a lead of the software subteam, with a focus on motion, state estimation, controls, and navigation. I enjoy finding solutions for these problems that lie between software and the physical robot.

I also did research at the de Boer Lab, where I worked on machine learning for genomics, training sequence-to-expression models on yeast artificial chromosome data.

This year, I joined the UBC PhysAI Lab under Prof. Peter Yichen Chen, contributing to a real2sim2real pipeline for thin shell deformable material manipulation, extending the lab's Agentic Real2Sim work to thin shells. I collect data of a robot arm manipulating thin shell materials and work toward identifying material parameters directly from video, aiming to eliminate manual simulation tuning.

Outside of it, I enjoy playing guitar, singing, playing soccer, cooking and eating (my beli account: https://beliapp.co/app/starrrynight). I am also an executive of UBC HKSA. I value genuine connections with like-minded people.

• C++
• Python
• C
• Vim (lol)
• C#
• Java
• Onshape
• SOLIDWORKS
• 3D Printing
• Machine Learning