Event Location: 1305 NSH
Bio: Hod Lipson is an Associate Professor of Mechanical & Aerospace Engineering and Computing & Information Science at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. He directs the Computational Synthesis group, which focuses on novel ways for automatic design, fabrication and adaptation of virtual and physical machines. He has led work in areas such as evolutionary robotics, multi-material functional rapid prototyping, machine self-replication and programmable self-assembly. Lipson received his Ph.D. from the Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in 1998, and continued to a postdoc at Brandeis University and MIT. His research focuses primarily on biologically-inspired approaches, as they bring new ideas to engineering and new engineering insights into biology.

Abstract: One of the most fundamental aspects of living systems is their ability to be self-sustaining: Processes such as self-reflection and self-modeling play a key role in cognitive adaptation; self-healing and self-replication play a key role in morphological adaptation. Yet most current robotic systems are externally programmed, designed and fabricated. This talk will describe a series of projects that explore processes that allow for autonomous adaptation through self analysis and assembly. The talk will describe an approach to adaptive behavior based on self-modeling, where a system continuously evolves multiple simulators of itself in order to make useful predictions. For adaptive morphology, a number of projects relating to bottom-up and top-down automated robot assembly will be shown.