Daniela Rus

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Programmable Matter with Self-reconfiguring Robots 

 

We wish to create programmable matter by using robot modules capable of self-reconfiguration: hundreds of small modules autonomously organize and reorganize as geometric structures to best fit the terrain on which the robot has to move, the shape of the object the robot has to manipulate, or the sensing needs of the given task. Self-reconfiguration leads to versatile robots that can support multiple modalities of locomotion, manipulation, and perception.

 

This talk will discuss the challenges of creating programmable matter, ranging from designing hardware capable of self-reconfiguration, to developing distributed controllers and planners for such systems that are scalable, adaptive, and support real-time behavior. We will discuss a spectrum of mechanical and computational capabilities for such systems and detail some recent self-reconfiguring robots.

 

Bio:

Daniela Rus is a professor in the EECS Department at MIT. She is the director of the Distributed Robotics Laboratory at CSAIL, the Co-Director of the CSAIL Center for Robotics, and an Associate Director of CSAIL. She holds a PhD degree in computer science form Cornell University. Her research interests include distributed robotics, mobile computing, and self-organization. She is the recipient of an NSF Career award and an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation fellowship. She is a class of 2002 MacArthur Fellow.

 

 

 

 

4:15pm

B17 Upson Hall

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Refreshments at 3:45pm in the Upson 4th Floor Atrium

Computer Science

Colloquium

Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering

www.cs.cornell.edu/events/colloquium