News!

We (Harvard College Eng. Society and CS199r) hosted the U.S Open Small-size Robot Soccer Competition at Hilles Penthouse, Harvard University, May 8-10th, 2009.

Article in Harvard Magazine on Bioengineering and Bio-inspired Engineering (jan 2009). Also see the accompanying movie from our group.

Harvard has announced the creation of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering -- the mission of this institute is to discover and harness engineering principles from nature to create new materials, devices, and control technologies (Oct 2008). Radhika is appointed as one of the core founding faculty members.

Chih-han and Radhika's paper at AAMAS 2008 is nominated for the Best Student Paper Award.

Radhika gets the NSF CAREER Award (SEAS homepage, Gazette Article), 2007.

Biological systems get tremendous mileage by using vast numbers of cheap and unreliable components to achieve complex goals reliably. For example, cells with identical DNA cooperate to form complex structures, such as ourselves, with incredible reliability in the face of cell death, variations in cell numbers, and changes in the environment. Emerging technologies have made it possible to create our own large-scale multi-agent systems, by bulk-manufacturing tiny computing and sensing agents and embedding these into materials and the environment. We would like to build novel applications from these technologies --- vast sensor-rich environments, robot swarms and reconfigurable modular robots, programmable materials. A key challenge is achieving the kind ofreliability and complexity that cells achieve:

• How does one creat globally robust systems, from the cooperation of vast numbers of unreliable agents?
• How does one translate desired global goals into the local interactions of vast numbers of agents?

My research interest is developing programming paradigms for robust collective behavior, inspired by biology. Developmental biology, how cells cooperate in tissues and multicellular organisms, can provide insights into how global self-repair and adaptation can be achieved through simple local behaviors. The study of social insects can teach us how to program cooperation and adaptation amongst mobile agents. Ultimately, the goal is to create a framework for the design and analysis of self-organising multi-agent systems. My group's approach is to formalize these strategies as algorithms, analysis, theoretical models, and programming languages. We are especially interested in global-to-local compilation, the ability to specify user goals at the high level and automatically derive provable strategies at the agent level. This methodology is applicable to a wide range of distributed multi-agent systems, from wireless sensor networks to modular and swarm robotics, and we pursue both theory and physical implementations of our work, especially in robotics.

My other research interest is understanding robust collective behavior in biological systems. Building artificial systems can give us insights into how complex global properties can arise from identically-programmed parts --- for example, how cells can form scale-independent patterns, how large morphological variations can arise from small genetic changes, and how complex cascades of decisions can tolerate variations in timing. I am interested in mathematical and computational models of multi-cellular behavior, that capture hypotheses of cell behavior and cell-cell interactions as multi-agent systems, and can be used to provide insights into systems level behavior that should emerge. We work in close collaboration with biologists, and currently study growth and pattern formation in the fruit fly wing.

Selected Publications:

• Programmable Self-Assembly Using Biologically-Inspired Multiagent Control, AAMAS 2002. (pdf)
• Collective Construction by Mobile Robots with Enhanced Building Blocks, ICRA 2006. (pdf)
• The Emergence of Geometric Order in Proliferating Metazoan Epithelia, Nature, Aug 31, 2006. (pdf)
• Self-organizing Desynchronization and TDMA on Wireless Sensor Networks, IPSN 2007. (pdf)
• Self-organizing Environmentally-adaptive Shapes on a Modular Robot, IROS 2007. (pdf)
• Automated Global-to-Local Programming in 1-D Spatial Multi-Agent Systems, AAMAS 2008. (pdf)

Media:

• Harvard Magazine Article, Jan 2009
• Faculty Profile in SEAS Newsletter, 2007.
• Microsoft New Faculty Fellowship Video, 2007
• Gazette Article, 2007.

Research Group:
For more detailed description of the projects we work on, see our research group webpage, 

Academic:

• CV (updated Oct 2008)
• Publications
• PhD Dissertation