Home

I develop computational approaches to designing and controlling systems of mobile robotic agents, especially those that use embodied intelligence or are strongly influenced by spatio-temporal characteristics of their environment. My work addresses both theoretical questions about formalization of robotic tasks, representations, and resource requirements, and practical questions about system design and resilience.

My work targets settings that are challenging for traditional approaches to control and planning for mobile robots, such as:

• persistent environmental monitoring, specifically in forestry, ecology, and robot-animal interactions (especially insects);
• environment-driven underactuated research platforms, such as drifting buoys or balloons; and
• micro-scale agents for medical and microbiological research.

Given these contexts, my work aims to make multi-robot systems more scalable by reducing per-robot resource use, such as battery size, sensor resolution and calibration, and wireless communication. Given the design constraints and objectives, we need novel algorithmic approaches to enable provable guarantees on system performance and robustness even when the system is nondeterministic, chaotic, or under-actuated. Part of achieving real-world robustness and safety involves the principled design of interfaces and specifications where humans are in the loop, so my work also involves human-computer/robot interaction (HCI/HRI) and programming languages.

At its core, my research seeks to answer these questions:

• How can we identify and leverage structure in robot-environment interactions to reduce per-agent resource requirements?
• How can we formalize the system design trade-offs seen in systems with embodied intelligence, where information processing is offloaded to the robot’s embodiment?
• How can we bring our insights from research to bear on practical systems that can assist humanity and our planet?

I have published at conferences such as ICRA, IROS, MRS, DARS, RoboSoft, MoCo, and WAFR, as well as journals IJRR and MDPI. I was involved in the development of The Robot Design Game.

My Ph.D. in Computer Science (2020) is from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Dr. Steven M. LaValle. I am now a Postdoc in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at Cornell University, in Dr. Kirstin Petersen’s Collective Embodied Intelligence (CEI) Lab.

My CV is here. My most up-to-date publication record is on Google Scholar; please contact me if you cannot access a publication.

Code and simulators that I publish and maintain can be found on my github or the CEI github.

Recent News

• May 2023: I was selected as a Cyber-Physical Systems Rising Star!
• February 2023: Honored to be a Microsoft Future Leader in Robotics and AI, and to share my work at the University of Maryland Robotics Center.
• November 2022: Attended DARS for the first time and presented work on collective systems of Braitenberg vehicles. A wonderful conference with much discussion of environmental and public health applications!
• August 2022: I will serve as interim PI for the CEI lab for several months, as part of the NSF Career-Life Balance Program. Congrats to Kirstin and Nils on the new addition to their family!
• May 2022: I will be attending ICRA 2022 in-person in Philadelphia to co-organize workshops on math and art!
• Spring 2022: I have assisted with one paper and led another on soft, inflatable robot collectives. I am excited about the implications of this work for micro-robotics as well as macro-scale robot collectives in aquatic and human-robot interaction settings!
• February 2021: Our IJRR paper on bouncing robots was published! This is the reference I recommend for my work on the bouncing robots. Now we can synthesize robust periodic orbits for robots that reorient when they collide with environment boundaries!