I arrived at the Robotics Institute two years ago looking for a good project, something tangible and preferably related to legged locomotion. Instead, I met Matt Mason and started to think about the big picture, ask the big questions. What is manipulation? What is robotics? What makes robotics particularly hard? To answer these questions, I set out to find the underlying structure to robotics — some common framework to connect all the scattered pieces. In this talk I will present my findings so far, focusing on physical systems modeling, thermal management of actuators, and tactile sensing.

Committee:

Matt Mason (Principal Advisor)

Aaron Johnson

William Martin