I had the opportunity to hear a Mark Yim lecture and speak with him a bit when I spent a summer at UPENN. He is a very interesting guy and is working on some neat projects (which he began a while ago at Stanford and PARC). He also teaches a course called "Mechatronics" which has some similar elements to FIRST and MIT's 2.007 (you can read an article about it
here).
I also visited the
GRASP lab a few times and saw some of the projects they are working on there. You should definitely stop by if you're in the area (the people there will probably show you around if you are genuinely interested in their work).