Interactive & Emergent Autonomy Lab

Current and past lab members at IROS 2023. October 2023.
Jake explaining handed shearing auxeticsm (HSAs) actuators at the Museum of Science and Industry. April 2023.
Allie (left) and Milli (right) demonstrating their research at the Museum of Science and Industry. April 2023.
Annalisa demonstrating Sphero robots at the Museum of Science and Industry. April 2023.
Tommy demonstrating a virtual human-robot interaction platform at the Museum of Science and Industry. April 2023.
Allie and Ahalya at International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR) in Switzerland, 2022.
Members of the lab at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in New York City, 2022.
Members of the lab on the sunset cruise at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in New York City, 2022.
IEA Lab (past and current!) on the sunset cruise at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in New York City, 2022.
Members of the lab on the sunset cruise at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in New York City, 2022.
Members of the lab at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in New York City, 2022.
Members of the lab at Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS) in New York City, 2022.
Members of the lab in front of the restaurant from Seinfeld in New York City, 2022.
IEA Lab at the Museum of Science and Industry for the national robotics week, 2022.
Jake showing the Ghost Robotics Minitaur at the Museum of Science and Industry, 2022.
Milli demonstrating the VR game setup at the Museum of Science and Industry, 2022.
Annalisa and Tommy demonstrating the Sphero game at the Museum of Science and Industry, 2022.
Katie, Ian and Todd met up at ICRA 2022 in Philadelphia!
Lab happy hour! Winter 2022.
Lab beach party! Summer 2021.
Members of the lab at the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Conference in Freiburg, Germany. 2019.
Members of the lab at the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Conference in Freiburg, Germany. 2019.
Members of the lab celebrating a birthday! June 2019.
Katie Fitzsimons demonstrating human-robot interaction at the Museum of Science and Industry
Katie showing a robot to children at the Museum of Science and Industry. April 2019.
Rab demonstrating her experiment at the Museum of Science and Industry. April 2019.
National Robotics Week at the Museum of Science and Industry. April 2019.
Ola showing off the Nao robot at the Museum of Science and Industry. April 2019.
Members of the lab at the Workshop on Algorithmic Robotics (WAFR) Conference in Merida, Mexico. December 2018.

About

In the Interactive and Emergent Autonomy Lab, our research focuses on computational methods in data-driven control, information theory in physical systems, and embodied intelligence. We investigate how both autonomous systems and biological systems interact with their environments (and, in some cases, with each other) to learn and improve their behaviors. This work often involves mathematical modeling, development of new mathematical tools, algorithmic implementation and programming, and experimentation.


News

Feb 15, 2024 New paper accepted to PNAS Nexus

Dec 11, 2023 Zixin Zhang joins the lab

Sep 30, 2023 New IROS paper on automatic gait generation for soft quadrupeds

May 25, 2023 Ola defends Ph.D. thesis

May 3, 2023 New review paper on embodied communication out at Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems

Jan 3, 2023 Ayush Gaggar joins the lab

October 2, 2022 New emergent communication paper out at Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

September 25, 2022 New point set registration paper out at International Symposium of Robotics Research

June 20, 2022 New embodied active learning paper out on Nature Communications

June 2, 2022 New hybrid reinforcement learning paper out on IJRR

May 24, 2022 Tommy received 2022 Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship

January 13, 2022 Taosha defends Ph.D. thesis

December 23, 2021 New paper on memristor circuits for microrobotics

October 7, 2021 New Nature paper on mechanical computing

September 21, 2021 Jonathan Bosnich joins the lab

Recent Papers

Collaborative Robots Can Augment Human Cognition in Regret-Sensitive Tasks
M. Schlafly, A. Prabhakar, K. Popovic, G. Schlafly, C. Kim, T. D. Murphey
PNAS Nexus (Volume 3, Issue 2), 2024. PDF

Automated Gait Generation For Walking, Soft Robotic Quadrupeds
J. Ketchum, S. Schiffer, M. Sun, P. Kaarthik, R. L. Truby, T. D. Murphey
IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023. PDF

Embodied Communication: How Robots and People Communicate Through Physical Interaction
A. Kalinowska, P. M. Pilarski, T. D. Murphey
Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems, 2023. PDF

Scale-Invariant Specifications for Human-Swarm Systems
J. Meyer, A. Prabhakar, A. Pinosky, I. Abraham, A. Taylor, M. Schlafly, K. Popovic, G. Diniz, B. Teich, B. Simidchieva, S. Clark, T. D. Murphey
Journal of Field Robotics (JFR), 2022. PDF

Towards situated communication in multi-step interactions: Time is a key pressure in communication emergence
A. Kalinowska, E. Davoodi, K. W. Mathewson, T. D. Murphey, P. Pilarski
Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (CogSci), 2022. PDF

Mechanical Intelligence For Learning Embodied Sensor-Object Relationships
A. Prabhakar, T. D. Murphey
Nature Communications, 2022. PDF, Code