Maggie Wang

robotics, space exploration, photography, writing

I have always been drawn to building and creating—starting with arts and crafts, then scientific experiments, and eventually complex engineering systems. I am an artist and writer at heart, a scientist and engineer by training. But most of all, I am passionate about learning and creating. Over the years, I’ve worked on a wide range of projects that reflect this curiosity.

Feel free to reach out if you’d like to connect about research or potential collaborations! 😊

PhD Projects

• Phys2Real - workshop paper in RSS Structured World Models for Robotic Manipulation (June 2025)
• NASA NSTGRO24 Fellow, in collaboration with NASA JPL, Adaptive World Models for Space Robotics: Implicit Representations Grounded in Semantics and Physics

Industry Research

• Designed and implemented a global graph-based planner, improved core flight algorithms for precise movement and multi-frame tracking, and trained optical flow models for subject localization at Skydio (Fall 2021-Spring 2023). Talk at the Women in Data Science Conference.
• Docking system for autonomous drones at Skydio (Summer 2019)
• Embedded systems and vision processing for smart homes at Nest/Google (Summer 2018)

Undergraduate Research & Projects

• Robust pose estimation in perception systems (keypoint detection) for robot manipulation at the MIT Robot Locomotion Group (paper, slides) (Fall 2019 - Spring 2021)
• Illegal gold mining barge detection in the Rio Madeira using data from Sentinel-1 (radar) and Planet Labs (optical) using both traditional computer vision and deep learning techniques (paper) (Spring 2021)
• Novel compressed model architecture and integer quantization to run keypoint detection system on an Arduino Nano 33 BLE (Nordic processor) with an Arducam 5 MP Plus (Fall 2020)
• Outlier detection and cycle-consistent matchings for a noisy perception problem using spectral graph theory techniques (including spectral clustering and eigenvector embedding) (Fall 2020)
• Operating system with virtual memory, buddy allocator, processes, threads, wait queues, file system, disk support, buffer cache, signals and system calls (Spring 2019)
• Led team that built fixed-wing planes in the Harvard Undergraduate Robotics Club’s Unmanned Aerial Systems team (now the Harvard Undergraduate Aeronautics Club) (Fall 2017 - Summer 2019)
• Helped start the Harvard Satellite Team (Fall 2018)
• Small model rockets with two friends, launched at my former middle school soccer field! (Summer 2018)
• Underwater robotics with the Harvard Self-Organizing Systems Research Group (Spring 2018)
• Magic mirror – Introduction to Electrical Engineering final project with three friends (Winter 2017)

Early Projects

• Control algorithms for drones at the Stanford Autonomous Systems Laboratory (Summer 2016)
• Programming Captain - built robots with FIRST Robotics Team 1868, The Space Cookies (Summer 2013 – Spring 2017)
• Project Leader for MIT Zero Robotics - algorithms ran on SPHERE satellites on the International Space Station (Summer 2014 - Winter 2015)
• Galaxy formation and evolution using data from the Hubble Space Telescope in the Department of Astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz through the Science Internship Program (Summers 2015, 2016) – Studying the Structure and Dynamics of the Subcomponents of the Andromeda Galaxy
• Face detection using eigenfaces with the programming team of my robotics team at Gunn High School Hackathon (Fall 2016)
• Sudoku generator and solver – AP Computer Science final project (2015)
• Bubboo Android game, released on Google Play (2014)
• Robotic ping-pong shooter and molecule random walkers at California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) in UC Davis, part 1 and part 2 (2013)
• iOS applications at various hackathons (2011-2013)
• Toy robot with a touch sensor to turn when it hit obstacles (2010)