Damon Skappel

Undergraduate Research

Concordia College · Moorhead, MN

• Comparative study of imitation-learning policies (Action Chunking Transformer vs. SmolVLA) on a real dual-arm SO-101 robot, trained on identical demonstration data.
• Built the full pipeline end-to-end on Hugging Face's LeRobot framework — assembled and calibrated the hardware, collected a 200-episode (~71k-frame) teleop dataset, and published it to the Hugging Face Hub.
• Trained ACT from scratch (100k steps) and fine-tuned the 450M-parameter SmolVLA, then deployed both policies for autonomous execution on the physical arm.
• Diagnosed a deep stack of Windows GPU-training issues (PyTorch/torchcodec/FFmpeg alignment, native DLL load-order segfault, HF cache symlink permissions) to bring up training on a dual-RTX-4000-Ada workstation; profiled training to inform a single- vs. multi-GPU (DDP) scaling decision.

IT Intern

Marvin Windows · Warroad, MN

• Write Apex code supporting digital team initiatives.
• Develop Lightning components and customize Salesforce Cloud applications.
• Collaborate cross-functionally to translate business needs into technical implementations.

Community Volunteer

Warroad, MN

• Completed 100+ hours of community service.
• Helped coordinate Hockey Day Minnesota.

B.A. Computer Science, Business & Data Science (Triple Major)

Concordia College, Moorhead, MN · Cybersecurity Operations concentration · GPA 3.8

High School Diploma

Warroad High School, Warroad, MN · GPA 4.2

Robot Imitation Learning: ACT vs. SmolVLA

Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face LeRobot, CUDA, Weights & Biases, SO-101 robot arm

• Comparative study of a lightweight specialist (ACT) vs. a pretrained generalist (450M-param SmolVLA) on a real-world manipulation task. Built the full pipeline end-to-end on the LeRobot framework, including a 200-episode (~71k-frame) teleop dataset published to the Hugging Face Hub.

Nixon Norman Media — Videography website

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP, SQL

• Full-stack site for a local videography business with admin layer for content management.

BlockBuster — Java game

Java, Swing

• Arcade-style puzzle game with persistent high scores and combo system.

Blackjack — Console game

Java, OOP

• AI-dealer blackjack with virtual betting, splitting, and doubling.

Data analytics projects

Tableau, statistical analysis

• Traffic-fatality analysis and NHL playoff prediction modeling.