Xiaorui Gu

Hi! I’m currently a MS student in Electrical Engineering at Northwestern University.
Prior to this, I spent my time as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois studying Mechanical Engineering.

Email / CV / LinkedIn

Updates

05/16/2025: I finished my undergraduate study at UIUC.

Research

I am generally interested in all robotics related topics (I like to group them as control, learning/planning, and perception). That being said, my focus is on robotic perception, especially tactile perception for enhancing robotic dexterity under contact-rich tasks. I believe multimodal perception with tactile information input will help us build safer human-robot interactions. I am currently working on dexterity hands' tactile perception under the guidence of Prof. Ed Colgate at the HAND ERC in Northwestern's Center for Robotics and Biosystems.

Publications

Intelligent Square Stepping Exercise System for Cognitive-Motor Rehabilitation in Older Adults with Multiple Sclerosis
Gu, X., Gupta, P., Liu, J., Zhou, H., Cisto, B., Khan, M. A., Mason, S., Motl, R., Sebastiao, E., & Hernandez, M. E.
Design of Medical Devices Conference, April 2025

A piezoresistive pressure sensor array, achieving high sensitivity and portability for gait analysis and rehabilitation exercise.

Recent Projects

SafeTaxi: Autonomous Driving with Static & Dynamic Obstacle Avoidance
My teammates were Nolan Wang & Adrian Santosh.
This was our final project for ECE484: Principles of Safe Autonomy, UIUC Spring 2025

We worked on control algorithms for lane following and various obstacle avoidance scenarios based vision/lidar inputs.

ASNE 2025 Promoting Electric Propulsion (PEP) Competition
My teammates were Matthew Bianchi, Noah Brody, Carter Eid, Sebastian Sanchez, Allan Zhu, Ethan Cho, Hongbo Nie, Kevin Ho, and Drew Stadelman.
This project served as our senior capstone design for ME470: Senior Design Project, UIUC Spring 2025

We researched, designed, and prototyped an uncrewed electric watercraft. I conducted battery-system proof of concept, power-efficiency calculations, and examination. I also worked on outreach and fundraising for the team.

Robotic Drawing from Images on a UR3
My teammate was Neil Ghose.
This was our final project for ECE470: Introduction to Robotics, UIUC Fall 2024

We worked on a UR3 robot arm using OpenCV, ROS, and inverse kinematics to plan optimal continuous paths by grouping edges and minimizing redundant motion in real-world coordinates.

Object Recognition on Mobile DSP
My teammate was Anay Koorapaty.
This was our final project for ECE420: Embedded DSP Systems, UIUC Fall 2024

We built an Android mobile app for landmark classification using SIFT feature extraction, K-means clustering, and SVM classification.

The Classic Inverse Pendulum Balancing
My teammates were Anay Koorapaty & Jai Anchalia.
This was our final project for ECE486: Control Systems, UIUC Spring 2024

We modeled and linearized a reaction-wheel pendulum; designed PD and 2-state/3-state/full-state feedback with friction compensation and a decoupled observer; validated in Simulink and experimental setups to balance upright.

Education

Northwestern University — Electrical and Computer Engineering, September 2025 – June 2027, expected
University of Illinois — Mechanical Science & Engineering, January 2023 – May 2025
Here I received most of my intro-level engineering education & training.
University of Illinois — Division of General Studies, August 2021 – January 2023
Here I finished most of my liberal arts curriculum and decided to transfer to engineering school.