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The HAWK Seminar Series

Neural Network Control Project

Positions Available

The goal of our research is to build machines which exploit their natural dynamics to achieve extraordinary agility and efficiency. We believe that this challenge involves a tight coupling between mechanical design and underactuated nonlinear control, and that tools from machine learning and optimal control can be used to produce this coupling when classical control techniques fail. Our projects include minimally-actuated dynamic walking on moderate terrain, quadrupedal locomotion on extreme terrain, fixed-wing acrobatics, flapping-winged flight, and feedback control for fluid dynamics.

The Robot Locomotion Group is a part of the CSAIL Center for Robotics.

Recent News

May 8, 2009. Congratulations to Elena Glassman for winning the EECS Masterworks Oral Thesis Presentation Award.

April 10, 2009. Congratulations to Woody Hoburg and Elena Glassman for winning the NSF Graduate Fellowship.

February 1, 2009. Congratulations to John Roberts for passing the qualifiers and submitting his Masters thesis!.

October 1, 2008. The Robot Locomotion Group has moved to the third floor. New directions can be found here.

September 22, 2008. The full-day workshop on "Robotics Challenges for Machine Learning" at IROS 2008 was a great success. PDFs of many of the talks and all of the poster abstracts are available on the meeting website. We plan to organize another Robot Learning workshop in 2009.

August 28, 2008. Katie Byl successfully defended her thesis. Congratulations Katie!

August 22, 2008. Russ Tedrake, Sebastian Seung, Alex Megretski, and Hongkun Park have been awarded an NSF EFRI for investigating the dynamics of neural networks on a planar patch-clamp array. You can find NSF's press release here.

August 5, 2008. The Phoenix (a 2m wingspan ornithopter) has taken it's first autonomous flight. Photos by Jason Dorfman.

   

July 26, 2008. Katie Byl was awarded the IFRR Student Fellowship for her paper/presentation at ISER 2008

July 3, 2008. The MIT Learning Locomotion (LittleDog) Team was awarded phase III funding. Photo by Jason Dorfman.



June 12, 2008. Russ Tedrake was awarded an NSF Career Award

May, 2008. Elena Glassman was awarded an NDSEG Graduate Fellowship

May 25, 2008. The new IEEE Technical Committee on Robot Learning is now online.

May 18, 2008. Russ Tedrake was awarded the Jerome Saltzer award for undergraduate teaching

May 13, 2008. Rick Cory wins the MIT Computer Science Masters Thesis Award

May 8, 2008. Rick Cory wins the Masterworks Award for his poster on perching planes and robotic ornithopters

April 14, 2008. Russ Tedrake was awarded the Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship