Narek Harutyunyan
Incoming PhD Student | UC Berkeley EECS | Robotics & AI
I am an incoming PhD student in the UC Berkeley EECS program. I graduated from Brown University with a B.S. in Computer Engineering. My research focuses on robotics and artificial intelligence—particularly reinforcement learning, stability in locomotion, and multi-robot systems—through work at Caltech's ARCL Lab, Carnegie Mellon's AirLab, and Brown's ACT Lab.
Research Experience
California Institute of Technology — ARCL Lab
May – September 2025Research Intern
Advisor: Soon-Jo Chung
Carnegie Mellon University — AirLab
May 2024 – July 2025Research Assistant
Advisor: Sebastian Scherer
Publications and Posters
MapExRL: Human-Inspired Indoor Exploration with Predicted Environment Context and Reinforcement Learning
IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR), 2025
Presented at the ICRA 2025 Workshop on Structured Learning for Efficient, Reliable, and Transparent Robots
Narek Harutyunyan*, Brady Moon*, Seungchan Kim, Cherie Ho, Adam Hung, Sebastian Scherer
ContractionPPO: Certified Reinforcement Learning via Differentiable Contraction Layers
To appear in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2026
V. Zinage*, N. Harutyunyan*, E. Verheyden*, F. Hadaegh, S.-J. Chung
(co-first-author)
MapEx: Indoor Structure Exploration with Probabilistic Information Gain from Global Map Predictions
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
Cherie Ho*, Seungchan Kim*, Brady Moon, Aditya Parandekar, Narek Harutyunyan, Chen Wang, Katia Sycara, Graeme Best, Sebastian Scherer
Downwash Dynamics: Impact of Quadrotor Separation on Forces, Moments, and Velocities for Dense Formation Flight
AIAA AVIATION FORUM AND ASCEND 2024
Anoop Kiran, Narek Harutyunyan, Nora Ayanian, Kenneth Breuer
RoboChaser
Brown University Deep Learning (DL) Day 2024 — TAs' Choice Award
O. Heng, N. Harutyunyan, J. Dhanda
Advancements in Multi-Robot Systems
Yale Northeast Robotics Colloquium (NERC) 2023
Alice Min*, Robayet Hossain*, Hammad Izhar*, Narek Harutyunyan*
Teaching
CSCI 1952z: Robots as a Medium
Spring 2024, Fall 2024, Spring 2026Head TA · Brown University
ENGN 0032: Introduction to Engineering
Fall 2023Teaching Assistant · Brown University
Honors & Awards
Tau Beta Pi Engineering Honor Society
2025Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF)
2025Caltech
Robotics Institute Summer Scholar (RISS)
2024Carnegie Mellon University
Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award (UTRA)
2023, 2024Brown University