October 15: Arjun Viswanathan: Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Locomotion

Meeting Announcement

When: Thursday, October 15, 2026, 7:00 to 9:00pm
Where: Artisans Asylum (96 Holton Street, Boston, MA 02135))
Register: Register

Agenda

7:00 Mingle, network, show and tell
7:30 Lightning Talks
- TBD
- TBD
7:45 Featured Speaker: Arjun Viswanathan
8:30 Q&A and Open Discussion
9:00 End of formal meeting

Featured Talk

Reinforcement Learning for Multimodal Locomotion

Arjun's MS thesis at Northeastern's Silicon Synapse Lab tackled a robot that could both walk and fly: the Husky-Beta legged-aerial platform. Crossing rough terrain meant more than learning to walk — the robot also had to learn which mode of locomotion to use at all, switching between legged and aerial movement depending on the terrain ahead. He'll walk through the hierarchical reinforcement learning approach that made this possible, and how it generalizes to multimodal robot behavior more broadly.

Speaker: Arjun Viswanathan

Arjun works on reinforcement learning for robot behavior at Boston Dynamics. He did his MS in Robotics at Northeastern's Silicon Synapse Lab, teaching the Husky-Beta legged-aerial robot to cross rough terrain with hierarchical RL — learning not just how to walk, but which mode of locomotion to use at all.