Dean Fortier

I'm a research engineer at Microsoft Research in Redmond, where I support a team building models for physical AI. I am fairly new to research, but prior to this I have been a Robotics Software Engineer at Optitrack supporting their ROS package and linux compatibility and Fresh Consulting where I supported various robotics related engineering projects listed below.

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Research Portfolio

I'm interested in robotics, computer vision, electronics, firmware, and deep learning. Most of my work is at the intersection of hardware, software, and control.

Modular 3D-printable robotic manipulation benchmark for evaluating affordance generalization in robot foundation models.

Engineering Portfolio

Selected engineering and robotics projects demonstrating practical system integration, prototyping, and deployment.

DrillSense is a demonstration of an onsite journeyman level physical AI assistant. This assistant was capable of combining the accuracy of computer vision and robot control with high level reasoning and collaboration using OpenAI voice AI.

Microsoft AI partnered with us to develop a promotional hardware piece for the Autonomous Systems group. They needed a bold platform to deploy, test, and interact with AI models created with Project Bonsai. I built out the vision, calibration, and controls systems.

We showcase an agentic system consisting of a voice agent front end for interacting with a user, a VLM to observe the state of the BusyBox, and a VLA to control bimanual manipulation of the Busybox

This ROS2 driver allows Optitrack's NatNet streaming service to connect to robot applications easier.

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