Robert MacCurdy
 |
Assistant Professor, Mechanical Engineering University of Colorado, Boulder Postdoc, MIT CSAIL 2015-2017 Ph.D. (Mechanical Engineering) Cornell University, 2015 M.S. (Mechanical Engineering) Cornell University, 2013 B.S. (Electrical Engineering) Cornell University, 1999 B.A. (Physics) Ithaca College, 1999 |
I've moved to CU Boulder and started the Matter Assembly Computation Lab!! Please see my current lab website: matterassembly.org
I'm looking for students who want to design & build robots, or create advanced wildlife tracking tools. Write to me (maccurdy at colorado dot edu) if you're interested in working with me!
I want to make robots much easier to design and build.
Someday soon robots will be made on-demand for specific tasks, consumed during use, and then recycled into new robots. They will be expendable. Unfortunately, we currently build robots by first manually designing them and then manually producing them, making them precious to the person who built them. It also takes a really long time to make robots this way! I'm designing automated approaches to fabricating robots that require no human intervention, and inventing automated design approaches that convert high-level behavior specifications (like, "build a robot that can run fast") into robot designs that can be fabricated automatically.
I am also passionate about aiding conservation through technology development.
I have been lucky enough to team up with some amazing biologists and ecologists who study birds, bats, whales, elephants and frogs. Together we have designed and built new automated instrumentation that allows them to dramatically scale up the quantity and quality of the scientific data that they can gather.
NEWS
05/11/18 - Our paper
about designing and fabricating compliant, handed shearing-auxetic
actuators was published in Science! These three videos (Vid1, Vid2, Vid3) demonstrate the system.
04/24/18 - Our paper about fabricating compliant robotic grippers based on handed shearing-auxetic actuators was presented at RoboSoft, 2018. This video demonstrates the system.
03/21/18 - Our paper about designing and testing a soft, untethered robot fish was published in Science Robotics! This video shows the system.
10/15/17 - I'm the general chair, along with Dave Levin from U. Toronto and Neil Gershenfeld, of this year's ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF), which will be held June 17-19, 2018 at MIT. Neil's Center for Bits and Atoms is hosting the SCF this year.
09/28/17 - Our paper on automatically designing and fabricating robots by folding was a finalist for the JTCF Novel Technology Paper Award at IROS 2017.
07/17/17 - I was on CBS This Morning with Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell. Check out the video.
07/10/17 - I'm going to CU Boulder!! I'll be starting as an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at CU Boulder this January, 2018. I'm looking for students, so write to me if you're interested in working with me.
06/17/17 - My paper on automatically designing and fabricating robots by folding was published in IEEE RA-L and will also be presented at IROS2017 in Vancouver. Also watch the accompanying video.
05/24/17 - I gave a talk at the LiveWorx conference in Boston.
11/21/16 - The Boston ABC channel WCVB broadcast a video piece about my Printable Viscoelastics work.
11/15/16 - The Printed Programmable Viscoelastics Youtube video now has more than 50,000 views!
11/8/16 - I've been awarded another patent! US 9,487,387: System and methods for actuation using electro-osmosis
10/4/16 - The Printed Programmable Viscoelastics work is featured on MIT's frontpage!
8/1/16 - The Printed Hydraulics Youtube video now has more than 250,000 views!
7/1/16 - My Printed Programmable Viscoelastics paper has been accepted to IROS 2016 in Daejeon, Korea. the IROS acceptance rate was 48% this year.
3/31/16 - Our first paper about the ecological science that can be done with my Automatic Tracking System will appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B!
1/15/16 - My Printed Hydraulics paper has been accepted to ICRA 2016 in Stockholm. ICRA's acceptance rate was 34.7% this year.
10/27/15 - I gave a talk: "Multicellular Machines” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Symposium on Informal Robotics
4/25/15 - I gave a talk: "Multicellular Machines” at the MIT Active Matter Summit. The video is available here.
2/12/14 - My work on BitBlox and printed magnets was featured on the PBS Newshour. Click the links for video segments from the show.
04/24/18 - Our paper about fabricating compliant robotic grippers based on handed shearing-auxetic actuators was presented at RoboSoft, 2018. This video demonstrates the system.
03/21/18 - Our paper about designing and testing a soft, untethered robot fish was published in Science Robotics! This video shows the system.
10/15/17 - I'm the general chair, along with Dave Levin from U. Toronto and Neil Gershenfeld, of this year's ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF), which will be held June 17-19, 2018 at MIT. Neil's Center for Bits and Atoms is hosting the SCF this year.
09/28/17 - Our paper on automatically designing and fabricating robots by folding was a finalist for the JTCF Novel Technology Paper Award at IROS 2017.
07/17/17 - I was on CBS This Morning with Charlie Rose, Gayle King and Norah O'Donnell. Check out the video.
07/10/17 - I'm going to CU Boulder!! I'll be starting as an assistant professor in the Mechanical Engineering department at CU Boulder this January, 2018. I'm looking for students, so write to me if you're interested in working with me.
06/17/17 - My paper on automatically designing and fabricating robots by folding was published in IEEE RA-L and will also be presented at IROS2017 in Vancouver. Also watch the accompanying video.
05/24/17 - I gave a talk at the LiveWorx conference in Boston.
11/21/16 - The Boston ABC channel WCVB broadcast a video piece about my Printable Viscoelastics work.
11/15/16 - The Printed Programmable Viscoelastics Youtube video now has more than 50,000 views!
11/8/16 - I've been awarded another patent! US 9,487,387: System and methods for actuation using electro-osmosis
10/4/16 - The Printed Programmable Viscoelastics work is featured on MIT's frontpage!
8/1/16 - The Printed Hydraulics Youtube video now has more than 250,000 views!
7/1/16 - My Printed Programmable Viscoelastics paper has been accepted to IROS 2016 in Daejeon, Korea. the IROS acceptance rate was 48% this year.
3/31/16 - Our first paper about the ecological science that can be done with my Automatic Tracking System will appear in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B!
1/15/16 - My Printed Hydraulics paper has been accepted to ICRA 2016 in Stockholm. ICRA's acceptance rate was 34.7% this year.
10/27/15 - I gave a talk: "Multicellular Machines” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design Symposium on Informal Robotics
4/25/15 - I gave a talk: "Multicellular Machines” at the MIT Active Matter Summit. The video is available here.
2/12/14 - My work on BitBlox and printed magnets was featured on the PBS Newshour. Click the links for video segments from the show.
Contact
Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
32 Vassar St, Room 32-375
Cambridge, MA 02139
maccurdy (at) mit (dot) edu