Our research focuses on a new class of smart materials that deeply embed sensing, actuation, computation and communication in order to adapt their physical properties to changing requirements with a specific focus on robotic manipulation.
As such robotic materials currently only exist in the lab, we investigate all aspects that are needed to make robotic materials ubiquitous, ranging from their design, their control using distributed algorithms and swarm intelligence, to their autonomous assembly.
The lab was founded in August 2009. Before this, Nikolaus was a Post-Doc with Daniela Rus‘s Distributed Robotics Laboratory at MIT, a PhD student with Alcherio Martinoli‘s Distributed Intelligent Systems and Algorithms Laboratory at EPFL, and a research assistant at the Collective Robotics Group, Caltech.




