Publications

In crowded environments, individuals must navigate around other occupants to reach their destinations. Understanding and controlling traffic flows in these spaces is relevant for coordinating robot swarms and designing infrastructure for dense populations...

Navigating dynamic environments is a fundamental challenge in distributed robotic systems, particularly when faults occur within the system itself, resulting in a changing connectivity graph. Classical graph search algorithms such as A* provide optimal...

Forms of collective intelligence range from natural and artificial neural networks to swarm robotics and social insect colonies. One key axis for comparing such systems is the mobility of their individual units: systems like neural networks and wireless...

"Robot factors" design, analogous to ergonomics for humans, seeks to create devices and equipment that can be readily operated by robots, by considering typical capabilities of current robots throughout the design process. While a number of principles and...

High aspect ratios are a common feature in biological systems like muscle fibers, tentacles, or annelids that inspire novel applications in artificial muscles, grasping, manipulation, and locomotion. This paper explores interoceptive and exteroceptive...

California blackworms constitute a recently identified animal system exhibiting unusual collective behaviors, in which dozens to thousands of worms entangle to form a "blob" capable of actions like locomotion as an aggregate. In this paper we describe a...

Modular self-reconfigurable robots can be used to build objects either by filling the space entirely with robots (densely packed) or by constructing a hollow internal structure (scaffolding) and coating the outside. Scaffolding offers many advantages for...

Gripper hardware design often involves a trade-off between distinct and sometimes opposing goals (e.g., high grasping force vs. gentleness). To address this trade-off within a single device, we present a multi-mode gripper with fingers that are scissor...

Soft robots offer a host of benefits over traditional rigid robots, including inherent compliance that lets them passively adapt to variable environments and operate safely around humans and fragile objects. However, that same compliance makes it hard to...

Robots are increasingly being called on to operate in settings and on tasks originally designed for humans, or where humans are also expected to work. Accordingly, the hardware and tools to be packaged, operated, or maintained are typically designed for...

In this paper, we discuss the role of gripper compliance in successful grasping and manipulation of thin, flexible materials. We show, both conceptually and empirically, that each axis of compliance in a planar gripper provides unique benefits in this...

Coordinated movement in animal groups (flocks, schools, herds, etc.) is a classic and well-studied form of collective behaviour. Most theoretical studies consider agents in unobstructed spaces; however, many animals move in often complicated environments...