What It Will Take to Make AI-Enabled Robots Safer News / April 29, 2026 Can the same AI safety techniques used for chatbots keep robots from harming people? Researchers from Penn Engineering, Carnegie Mellon and Oxford argue that the answer is no. The group argues that because robots can turn flawed reasoning into physical action, they need a more robust safety framework, one that... Read More
No Plan, No Problem: Teaching Robots to Build Without Blueprints News / June 17, 2025 Bees, ants and termites don’t need blueprints. They may have queens, but none of these species breed architects or construction managers. Each insect worker, or drone, simply responds to cues like warmth or the presence or absence of building material. Unlike human manufacturing, the grand design emerges simply from the... Read More
George Pappas and Nikolai Matni Receive 2024 IEEE Control Systems Society Best Paper Awards News / December 18, 2024 George Pappas, UPS Foundation Professor of Transportation in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) and Associate Dean for Research for Penn Engineering, and Nikolai Matni, Assistant Professor in ESE, have been recognized with awards from the Control Systems Society (CSS) of the IEEE honoring their publications in IEEE Transactions on Automatic... Read More
Unfolding the Next Generation of Robots: GRASP Researchers Win Award for Kinegami News / July 29, 2024 Researchers in the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania are developing an algorithm for designing functioning robots through folding. The paper that details the design and code behind the project, Kinegami: Algorithmic Design of Compliant Kinematic Chains From Tubular Origami, was awarded an... Read More
Building Robots that Learn: Pratik Chaudhari Investigates the Underpinnings of AI News / April 4, 2024 Growing up, Pratik Chaudhari, Assistant Professor in Electrical and Systems Engineering (ESE) and member of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Laboratory, just wanted to build robots. After starting in college with wheeled robots, he moved on to hopping robots, before graduating as a master’s student to self-driving... Read More
