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Helena presenting at the department research fair. January 2026.

Former and current lab members reuniting at RSS 2025. June 2025.

Max presenting at RSS 2025. June 2025.

Lab members at ICRA 2025. May 2025.

Prof. Murphey receives the Distinguished Service Award at ICRA 2025. May 2025.

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.

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.

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 celebrating a birthday! June 2019.

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.

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

May 24, 2025 Todd receives the IEEE RAS Distinguished Service Award

Nov 13, 2024 Jueun Kwon joins the lab

May 2, 2024 New paper accepted to Nature Machine Intelligence

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

Recent Papers

Real-Time Reinforcement Learning for Dynamic Tasks with a Parallel Soft Robot
J. Avtges, J. Ketchum, M. Schlafly, H. Young, T. Kim, A. Pinosky, R. L. Truby, T. D. Murphey
IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2025. PDF

Sample-Efficient Online Control Policy Learning with Real-Time Recursive Model Updates
Z. Zhang, J. Avtges, T. D. Murphey
Conference on Robot Learning (CoRL), 2025. PDF

Flow Matching Ergodic Coverage
M. M. Sun, A. Pinosky, T. D. Murphey
Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS), 2025. PDF

Data Augmentation for NeRFs in the Low Data Limit
A. Gaggar, T. D. Murphey
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025. PDF

Inverse Mixed Strategy Games with Generative Trajectory Models
M. M. Sun, P. Trautman, T. D. Murphey
IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025. PDF

Embodied Active Learning of Generative Sensor-Object Models
A. Pinosky, T. D. Murphey
International Symposium of Robotics Research (ISRR), 2024. PDF

Maximum diffusion reinforcement learning
T. A. Berrueta, A. Pinosky, T. D. Murphey
Nature Machine Intelligence (6, 504–514), 2024. PDF