Leah M. Lackey

Electrical & Computer Engineer · PhD Student, Cornell University

I'm an electrical & computer engineer and a PhD student at Cornell University in the Napp Lab, where I work on sensing and state estimation for tiny robots. I'm also an engineer at two startups, Empathera and Clover Common Robotics.

Research

At Cornell, I work on robotics, especially sensing and state estimation for small robots that don't have much room for sensors or computing power. Before coming to Ithaca, I did research at Yale's Lens Media Lab and Western Washington University's ASPECT Lab.

Pose estimation for insect-scale robots current

state estimation · micro-aerial vehicles · embedded

Insect-sized flying robots can't carry much. I'm building a small receiver and estimator that tracks a robot's position and orientation to under a millimeter, combining IMU data with laser sweeps from off-the-shelf VR base stations, and it runs in real time on a microcontroller.

Haptic perception for robot manipulation

robot learning · haptics · datasets

I contributed to CLAMP with Cornell's EmPRISE Lab: a large crowdsourced haptic dataset, collected with an open-source device, for teaching robots what objects are made of.

Computational analysis of art materials

computer vision · machine learning · cultural heritage

At Yale's Lens Media Lab and WWU, I used imaging and neural networks to study the surfaces of photographic and printmaking papers: measuring surface roughness from raking-light images, and comparing paper textures (including in Matisse lithographs) with triplet networks.

Experience

Projects

Software

gwark.dev live

browser tools · static web · open source

Small tools that run in the browser. No accounts, and your files stay on your machine.

  • Paperstack: a PDF editor for reordering, splitting, extracting, signing, watermarking, and compressing
  • openlabbench: interactive pinouts for dev boards and chips (Raspberry Pi, Pico, ESP32, Arduino, Teensy, and more), part equivalents, and printable cheat sheets, generated from one JSON file per board
  • roboticsbench: a rotation converter, a URDF viewer with forward kinematics and Jacobians, PID tuning, Kalman and particle filters, and motion planning from BFS to RRT*
  • eigenwave: lessons that start with eigenvectors and work up through convolution, the DFT and FFT, sampling, and the Laplace and z-transforms, with plots you can drag and signals you can play

StartIpsum live

static web · AWS S3 · curated dataset

Helps students find startup funding competitions, accelerators, incubators, and hackathons across the US and Canada, with deadline- and location-aware search over a monthly-updated catalog.

StrippedRecipes live

full-stack web · serverless · AWS Lambda

Paste a recipe link and get just the ingredients and steps, without the life story.

The Hamsterdome live

web · HTML/CSS/JS

My 90s-style personal site, built in plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Canvas arcade games, a pixel-art computer history museum, and an unreasonable number of hamsters.

The Lens Media Lab pages live

web · machine learning · cultural heritage

The web tools I built at Yale's IPCH Lens Media Lab in 2022–2023. The lab closed in 2025, so I moved them to phototexture.net. Texture Matching Lite classifies photographic paper textures with a semi-supervised triplet-loss network (first developed in the ASPECT Lab at WWU): it rates a paper from smooth to rough and matches uploaded samples against the lab's reference collection. Glyphomatic plots texture measurements, and there's also an image processing page. They're made for conservators, researchers, and photo historians.

Hardware

Tiny Tapeout: 6-bit shift register in fabrication

ASIC · Tiny Tapeout · Wokwi

My project from my first Tiny Tapeout workshop: a 6-bit shift register with toggle-enabled feedback, now being fabricated. It fits in a single 1×1 tile, with clock, reset, and two data inputs driving six outputs. [Wokwi design]

6502 computer in progress

6502 · breadboard · digital design

A computer built from scratch on breadboards around the classic MOS 6502 CPU, following Ben Eater's 6502 computer project.

Tape-measure Yagi antenna

RF · Yagi · SDR · DIY

A homemade directional Yagi antenna built from PVC pipe and tape-measure elements, paired with an RTL-SDR USB dongle for software-defined radio.

Earlier projects

Education

Fellowships & Community

Publications

  1. J. DiSciacca, D. Crockett, L. Lackey, and P. Messier. "Surface roughness from raking light images." Surface Topography: Metrology and Properties, 2026. [doi]
  2. P. N. Thakkar, S. Sinha, K. Baijal, Y. Bian (Anjelica), L. Lackey, B. Dodson, H. Kong, J. Kwon, A. Li, Y. Hu, A. Rekoutis, T. Silver, and T. Bhattacharjee. "CLAMP: Crowdsourcing a LArge-scale in-the-wild haptic dataset with an open-source device for Multimodal robot Perception." Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025. [project] [arXiv]
  3. K. M. Aguilar, S. Powers, L. Lackey, A. Grootveld, and A. G. Klein. "Assessing Paper Texture Similarity in Matisse Lithographs Using a Triplet Neural Network." IEEE MIT Undergraduate Research Technology Conference (URTC), 2021. [doi]
  4. A. Grootveld, V. I. Bugayev, L. Lackey, A. G. Klein, K. Vedula, and D. R. Brown. "Tracking of Dynamical Processes with Model Switching Using Temporal Convolutional Networks." IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2021. [doi]
  5. L. Lackey, A. Grootveld, and A. G. Klein. "Semi-supervised Convolutional Triplet Neural Networks for Assessing Paper Texture Similarity." Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers, 2020. [doi]
  6. A. Grootveld, L. Lackey, S.-P. Yang, C. Clark, A. G. Klein, and K. Vedula. "Combined classifiers for unmanned vehicle anomaly detection." IEEE Signal Processing Cup, 2020. [Google Scholar]