Spring 2025 GRASP SFI: Danna Ma, Cornell University, “Harnessing Physical Intelligence for Collective Motion in Robotic Matter”
March 26 @ 3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
This will be a hybrid event with in-person attendance in Levine 307 and virtual attendance on Zoom.
ABSTRACT
In recent years, the field of swarm robotics has seen rapid advancements, from research to industry. While most work focuses on programmed intelligence, swarms in nature demonstrate that physical intelligence—where agents perform tasks based on their morphology and physical interactions with the environment—also plays a critical role. In my work, I have developed a robotic swarm of smart particles, or ‘smarticles,’ which can serve both as a taskable robotic platform and as a smart material. In this talk, I will discuss the electro-mechanical design, sensory feedback mechanisms, and adaptive control strategies that enable smarticles to exhibit emergent collective motion, demonstrating how they can operate autonomously without the need for a central controller, high-bandwidth communication, or extensive pre-planning.
Presenter
Danna Ma
Danna Ma is a final-year Ph.D. candidate in the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab, advised by Prof. Kirstin Petersen in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University. Prior to her doctoral studies, Danna earned her Master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Cornell University in 2018 and her Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the National University of Singapore in 2016. Her current research focuses on the design and control of physically intelligent robotic swarms, with the goal of understanding and harnessing the complex collective behaviors that emerge from local interactions among agents.