![]() ![]() The Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab represents the core of robotics research in Cornell ECE. “There are many examples in nature where we see that you can have really interesting and robust outcomes from systems like that,” she said. Once you get to big enough swarms, Petersen explained, it starts making sense to think about distributed intelligence instead of centralized controllers telling each robot what to do. “We’re looking at how we can bring intelligence out in those kinds of systems,” she said. When many robots are working together embodied in the same environment, their physical interactions and their morphology mean something. “There are a lot of things that many robots can do in collaboration that single robots can’t, even if the single robots individually are much, much smarter,” Petersen said. Can social robots learn from this organic intelligence? They seem to use the environment itself as a shared database. Petersen points out that social organisms demonstrate an implicit intelligence, incorporated into their morphology, into the physical interactions between organisms and into the way they modify their shared environments. “What kind of intelligence can we program into the body of the robot? What kind of intelligence comes from many robots working together?” “We're looking at alternative types of intelligence,” Petersen said. She founded the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab in Cornell ECE in 2016 to research the design and coordination of large robot collectives which are to achieve complex behaviors beyond the reach of single robot systems. This lets farmers estimate which areas of a field have been pollinated.Īssistant Professor Kirstin Petersen is interested in bio-inspired robot collectives and studies of their natural counterparts, especially in relation to construction, exploration, and agriculture. Biological InspirationĬollaboration with Associate Professor Al Molnar’s lab has developed technology to leverage bees as bio-monitors, outfitted with backpack flight recorders to produce foraging probability maps. In short, robots could not exist without ECE, a field that excels at bridging novel hardware and computational architecture to create intelligent physical systems. Robotics provides a unique platform for science education because so many disciplines converge to make a robot work. ![]() The core elements of a robot: sensing, planning and decision making, and control and action are all research areas within electrical and computer engineering. Robotics research in Cornell ECE is taking inspiration from surprising sources and asking interesting questions. From the design of its circuits and chips, to the actuators and algorithms that allow it to move and think, a robot represents research from many disparate fields working together in ever more novel ways to create something greater than electrical, mechanical, computer or systems engineering could produce on its own. Perception, computational intelligence, and action represent foundational principles in ECE.Ī robot is an intersectional device. A robot takes action to positively affect its environment. Robots can be programmable and designed to make real-time computations and decisions about their tasks. They use sensors to understand internal signals and external surroundings. Robots are physical systems which can perceive, reason about, and act upon their environment. ![]() In the past several years, Cornell ECE has been expanding its robotics faculty and building a program that positions robotics as a central pillar of teaching and research within the department. What is a robot? For Cornell’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, it’s the intersection of a broad range of research and a useful vehicle to explore core aspects of engineering education. How robotics is driving new research into foundational aspects of ECEīy Eric Laine, from the ECE Connections magazine. Martha is an open-source platform designed for human robot interaction studies. Photo: Petersen and her students test the Martha robot in the Computer Systems Lab space in Rhodes Hall. ![]()
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