Rob MacCurdy headshot
Assistant Professor • Vogel Leadership Development Fellow • Robotics and Systems Design, Design
maccurdy@colorado.edu
303-735-5667

Office Location: ECES 154
Lab Location: ECES 1B14

Research Interests

Automated design and fabrication of robots, automated biological and ecological sensing

Building robots via conventional practice requires painstaking design and assembly steps that rely heavily on human intuition and individual expertise. I develop algorithms and fabrication techniques that automate the design and production of customized robots in order to accelerate this process, with the goal of automatically designing robots that "walk out of the printer".ÌýMy research creates design synthesis algorithms and manufacturing technologies, with the goal of a unified software and hardware tool chain that can automatically synthesize, evaluate, and fabricate electromechanical devices. The simple description is: "robots creating robots".

Select publications

  • J. Lipton, R. MacCurdy, Z. Manchester, L. Chin, D. Cellucci, D. Rus. "Handedness in shearing auxetics creates rigid and compliant structures". Science, 11 May 2018, PP 632-635
  • R. Katzschmann, J. DelPreto, R. MacCurdy, D. Rus. "Exploration of underwater life with an acoustically controlled soft robotic fish". Science Robotics, 21 Mar 2018
  • D. Cellucci, R. MacCurdy, H. Lipson and S. Risi "1D Printing of Recyclable Robots", IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters , 2017, PP, 1 - 1
  • MacCurdy R, Katzschmann R, Kim Y and Rus D (2016), "Printable hydraulics: A method for fabricating robots by 3D co-printing solids and liquids", In 2016 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)., May, 2016. , pp. 3878-3885.
  • MacCurdy R, Lipton J, Li S and Rus D (2016), "Printable Programmable Viscoelastic Materials for Robots", In 2016 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).
  • MacCurdy R, McNicoll A and Lipson H (2014), "Bitblox: A Printable Digital Material for Electromechanical Machines", International Journal of Robotics Research. Vol. 33(10), pp. 1342-1360.
  • MacCurdy RB, Gabrielson RM and Cortopassi KA (2018), "Automated Wildlife Radio Tracking", IEEE Handbook of Position Location: Theory, Practice, and Advances Vol 2.Ìý John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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