Harrison Saperstein

Robotics Engineer · AI Forward

Senior Software Verification Engineer at Medtronic, specialized in surgical robotic software. Outside of work, I'm building an RL pipeline from data generation in Blender through training in NVIDIA's Isaac Lab. Along the way, I'm exploring agentic architectures and solution development.

Harrison Saperstein

Current project

RoboticsMachine LearningAI

Robotic DnD

DnD is a game of chance, and control is an illusion. Training a robot to hand me the right die felt like the next best thing.

Robotic DnD
RoboticsMachine Learning

Robotic DnD

Ask for a d20 and the robot picks it out of the pile. Underneath it's a Franka Panda in Isaac Lab, finding dice with a detector that has never seen a real photo - only renders from my dice generator. The sim's ground truth checks my work, it never does the work.

Built with

NVIDIA Isaac LabYOLOClaude Code
Four of the five die types pass. The d4 doesn't - I called that one before the demo ran. Flat gripper pads squeeze a tetrahedron right out of the grasp, and I haven't solved it yet.

Experience

5

years in surgical robotics

MS + BS

Robotics Engineering at WPI

15+

manual processes automated

WEEKS → DAYS

per verification cycle

Medtronic - Hugo RAS Boston, MA · Aug 2021 - Present

Senior Software Verification Engineer · July 2024 - Present

Hugo is Medtronic's robotic-assisted surgery platform. I architect the automated testing frameworks that verify it - migrating legacy manual processes to automated pipelines, building Python test tooling that cut verification cycles from weeks to days, and mentoring engineers on automation and troubleshooting.

Software Verification Engineer II · Aug 2021 - July 2024

Built the automated test framework (Python + Squish) and the system-in-loop and software-in-loop verification protocols.

Hubbell Inc. - Research and Development Avon, CT · May 2019 - Apr 2021

Machine Learning Intern

Real-time object detection on video streams with TensorFlow, OpenCV, and TensorRT.

WPI - MS Robotics Engineering '21 · BS Robotics Engineering '20

Download resume

Projects

Procedural Dice Asset Generator
Machine LearningComputer Vision

Procedural Dice Asset Generator

A headless-Blender pipeline that procedurally generates a labeled library of TTRPG dice, grown into a full synthetic-to-real object detection pipeline: rendered scenes, COCO annotations, and a trained YOLO detector.

Procedural Dice Asset Generator
Machine LearningComputer Vision

Procedural Dice Asset Generator

What started as a Blender script to generate some dice grew into a full pipeline: build a dice library, render tabletop scenes, label them automatically, and train a detector without a single real photo. Then I pointed it at real photos to see what would happen.

Built with

BlenderYOLO11COCO
2,100 dice, 10,000 scenes, 51,505 labels - and a model that aced synthetic validation, then stumbled on real photos. Working out exactly how it stumbled turned out to be the best part of the project.
AI
AI

Agentic AI Experiments

A running log of experiments with agentic AI tools and workflows.

AI

Agentic AI Experiments

A running log of experiments with agentic AI tools and workflows.

6-DOF Robotic Arm
RoboticsComputer VisionMachine Learning

6-DOF Robotic Arm

Exploration of the kinematics and control of the Annin-Robotics AR4 6-DoF robotic arm using ROS2.

6-DOF Robotic Arm
RoboticsComputer Vision

6-DOF Robotic Arm

Getting a hobby-class arm, the Annin Robotics AR4, to move the way I want it to - working through the kinematics and control in ROS2.

Built with

ROS2

About

Hi, I'm Harrison (Harry) Saperstein. I graduated from WPI with my MS/BS in Robotics Engineering in 2021. WPI introduced me to what it means to be robotic, and somewhere between solving for the kinematics of serial manipulators and watching them actually move, I grew an itch that's been hard to satisfy ever since.

By day I verify software for a surgical robot; nights and weekends I build the projects on this page. This site is where I scratch the itch: solving problems, making robots move, and continuing to grow as an engineer.

Off the clock

What I'm into when I'm not building.

Winters

Skiing.

Summers

Golf and a rec softball league.

Boston sports

The Sox, Pats, B's and C's.

Maker YouTube

Adam Savage's Tested, Jeremy Fielding, StuffMadeHere, Nerdforge, Alec Steele.

Science YouTube

Veritasium, Smarter Every Day.

Tech YouTube

Linus Tech Tips, MKBHD, JayzTwoCents.