Tapo’s research aims at enabling robots to assist people with mobility limitations with activities of daily living. There are a myriad of such activities in real homes and they are very different from one another, but they inevitably require physical interaction between robots and their immediate surroundings in unstructured and/or cluttered human environments. The fundamental research question that Tapo is interested in is how to leverage robot-world physical interactions in unstructured human environments to efficiently and safely perform relevant activities of daily living. This spans research in the fields of Human-Robot Interaction, Haptic Perception, and Robot Manipulation. With his background in both CS and ME, Tapo is a full-stack roboticist. He is not only passionate about developing algorithms that solve fundamental problems in these domains but also strongly believes in developing real robotic systems, deploying them in the real world, and evaluating them with real users.