My research focuses on control
strategies for groups of robots and other distributed systems. Evolved
biological systems reliably work in random, unstructured, and fluctuating
environments, often with a baffling lack of detailed information, planning,
and communication. Their approach seems to focus on self-organization,
managing noise created by many interacting components, and using reactive
behaviors as feedback to adapt their strategies. Can we engineer robots
with similarly fault tolerant behavior?
Currently, I am applying these biological guiding principles to robotic construction, specifically, termite inspired construction algorithms that can cope with unstructured uncertain terrain and disturbances by exploiting a combination of reactive behaviors and compliant construction materials. Previously, my thesis work focused on tuning local behaviors to reliably achieve predictable global behavior from unreliable or stochastic components. I have built and worked with several robotic test-beds to develop, refine, and test these control strategies.
Projects
Amorphous Robotic Construction
The goal of this project is to create algorithms and hardware that can reliably build
structures in uncertain, unstructured terrain. Some animal species,
e.g. Macrotermes michaelseni termites, are really good at this type of
construction. Their skill depends on the tightly coupled interaction of construction
strategy and construction material. M. michaelseni and other animals often
take advantage goopy, amorphous materials to build in irregularly shaped
environments. From a robotics perspective, this approach is appealing since mechanical
feedback during construction not only makes the process robust, but
potentially allows for much coarser control and sensing requirements of the
construction mechanism. The robots I am working on use polyurethane foam as amorphous
construction material. Depositions are modeled as operator applications to continuous
functions, and robust strategies are designed to always reach desirable invariant sets
after a finite number of depositions.
Movies:
Simulation of robot (blue circle) building a large ramp. [avi] (3.5 mb)
Foam deposition mechanism creating a level deposition. [mp4] (4.1 mb)
Factory Floor
The Factory Floor Testbed is an experiment to explore scalable, robust, multi robot
construction hardware and algorithms. It consists of modular robots that can build
arbitrary lattice structures from two types of raw materials. The hardware is built by
the (ModLab) at the University of Pennsylvania. My role in the project is the design of
models and robust construction algorithms for the testbed.
Movies:
Simulation of Factory Floor Testbed building a chair.
[avi] (4.9 mb)
Robotic Chemistry
The Robotic Chemistry Testbed is physical instantiation of a tunable Stochastic
Chemical Reaction Network. It consists of three simple types of robots that are also
randomly stirred on an air table. They are machined from polyurethane foam with
embedded magnets. One type of robot has an analog circuit connected to solar cells
that allow it to collect energy and break apart the dimers formed by the other two
types. In this project I helped with the initial design and advised a team of
undergraduate students with the construction and detailed design.
Movies:
Active robot disassembling a dimer.
[avi]
(1.1 mb)
Testbed observed via overhead camera (2x real time).
[avi] (3.3 mb)
Programmable Parts
The Programmable Parts Testbed is a stochastic self
assembly experiment. Triangular robots are randomly stirred on an air table
so that their motion cannot be controlled be directly controlled by the
experimentor. However, the robots binding behavior with respect to other
robots can be controlled by specifying local rules as a graph grammar. We
showed how to create grammars to build arbitrary shapes and used the testbed
as an instantiation of a Stochastic Chemical Reaction network. I did most of
the electrical and mechanical design work for these robots as well as
writing the embedded control software for interpreting graph grammars.
Movies:
Prototypes latching, communicating, and unlatching.
[avi] (545 kb)
Hexagon formation observed via overhead camera (5x real time).
[avi]
(3.0 mb)
Publications
- N. Napp and R. Nagpal, Distributed Amorphous Ramp Construction in Unstructured Environments . International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS12), Baltimore, Maryland, 2012. Runner-up for Best Conference Paper award. [PDF]
- N. Napp, J. M. Wu, O. R. Rappoli, and R. Nagpal, Materials and Mechanisms for Amorphous Robotic Construction In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS12), Vilamoura, Portugal, 2012. [PDF]
- K. Petersen, N. Napp, J. Chin-Lee, J. Werfel and R. Nagpal, 3D Tracking of Building Processes in Macrotermes , Visual Observation and Analysis of Animal and Insect Behavior, Workshop at International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR), Tsukuba Science City, Japan, 2012. [PDF]
- N. Napp and E. Klavins, Load Balancing for Multi-Robot Construction. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA11), Shanghai, China, pp 254--260, 2011. [PDF]
- N. Napp and E. Klavins, A Compositional Framework for Programming Stochastically Interacting Robots. The International Journal of Robotics Research , Volume 30(6), pp 713--729, 2011. [PDF]
- N. Napp and E. Klavins. Robust by Composition: Programs for Multi-Robot Systems. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA10), Anchorage, AK, USA, pp 2459---66, 2010. [PDF]
- N. Napp, S. Burden, and E. Klavins. Setpoint Regulation for Stochastically Interacting Robots. Autonomous Robots, special RSS Issue, Volume 30(1), pp 57--71, 2011. [PDF]
- N. Napp, S. Burden, and E. Klavins. Setpoint Regulation for Stochastically Interacting Robots. Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS09), Seattle, Washington, USA, 2009. Nominated for Best Student Paper award. [PDF]
- N. Napp, D. Thorsley, and E. Klavins. Hidden Markov Models for Non-Well-Mixed Reaction Networks. [PDF] Proceedings of American Control Conference (ACC09), St. Louis, Missouri, USA, 2009.
- N. Napp and E. Klavins. An extended state-space markov chain model for self-organizing systems in non-well-mixed environments. In 4th Annual Conference on the Foundations of Nanoscience, Snowbird, UT, April 2007. Contributed Talk + Abstract.
- S. Burden, N. Napp, and E. Klavins. The statistical dynamics of programmed robotic self-assembly . In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA06), Orlando, FL, USA, pp 1469--76, 2006. [PDF]
- S. Burden, N. Napp, and E. Klavins. Tuning reaction networks for self-assembly. In 3rd Annual Conference on the Foundations of Nanoscience , Snowbird, UT, April 2006. Poster + Abstract.
- E. Klavins, S. Burden, and N. Napp. Optimal rules for programmed stochastic self-assembly. Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS06), Philadelphia, PA, 2006. [PDF]
- J. Bishop, S. Burden, E. Klavins, R. Kreisberg, W. Malone, N. Napp, and T. Nguyen. Self-organizing programmable parts . In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS05), Edmonton, AB, Canada, 2005. [PDF]
Education
B.S., Engineering, Math, Harvey Mudd College CA, 2003
M.S., Electrical Engineering, University of Washington WA, 2006
PhD., Electrical Engineering, University of Washington WA, 2011