My research focuses on design and control strategies for systems that operate with uncertainty. Evolved biological systems reliably work in cluttered, unstructured, and fluctuating environments, and often do so with a baffling lack of global information, planning, and communication. Their approaches seem to focus on self-organization, managing noise created by many interacting components, and using distributed reactive behaviors as feedback to adapt their strategies. In my group, we apply these biological guiding principles to develop algorithms and build robots that can operate reliably in messy and unstructured real-world environments.
