A broad range of next-generation applications will be enabled by low-energy, miniature mobile robotics including insect-size flapping wing robots that can help with search and rescue, chip-size satellites that can explore nearby stars, and blimps that can stay in the air for years to provide communication services in remote locations. While the low-energy, miniature actuation, and sensing systems have already been developed in many of these cases, the processors currently used to run the algorithms for autonomous navigation are still energy-hungry. Our research addresses this challenge as well as brings together the robotics and hardware design communities.
We enable efficient computing on various key modules of other autonomous navigation systems including perception, localization, exploration and planning. We also consider the overall system by considering the energy cost of computing in conjunction with actuation and sensing.