ECE 4950, Teaching Team 2020 Fall
Professor Kirstin Petersen
Kirstin is an assistant professor at Cornell in the department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, with field memberships in CS, MAE, and SYSEN. She has taught ECE 3400 Intelligent Physical Systems, ECE 6680 Multi-Agent Systems, ECE 6970 Robots, Food, and Wine, and now ECE 4960 Fast Robots. When she is not teaching she runs the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab, which covers research on design and coordination of large robot collectives able to achieve complex behaviors beyond the reach of single robot systems, and corresponding studies on how social insects do so in nature. Before Cornell, Kirstin did a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Germany, and a doctorate in Computer Science at Harvard University. In her spare time, Kirstin loves to hang out with her son, kayak, and build more robots.
Vivek (‘we wake’) Thangavelu
Hi, this is Vivek and he likes to talk in the third person. Vivek is an ECE graduate student working in the Napp lab. He considers himself to be a field roboticist (a fancy term used to persuade oneself for lacking expertise in any one specific area) and wants to help build colonies that are not on earth (**insert futurama meme**). He currently designs robots that can build structures with found stones, and hopefully someday teach them to love. Here is a video of their robot (intentionally) moon walking after a day’s worth of construction work.
Sadie Cutler
Sadie is an MAE graduate student working in Dr. Petersen’s lab. She is currently studying ways to use drones to increase crop yields of strawberries, being sure to help and not hurt natural pollinators which are much better at pollination than the drone. When she’s not eating research strawberries, she enjoys trying new things like triathlons.
Alex Coy
Alex Coy is an ECE senior with a focus on analog and embedded design. Outside of academics, he enjoys cooking, making music, and audiovisual production. Some of his favorite achievements have been being the unofficial “Barbecue Dad” for the Big Red Marching Band and baking Chicago-style deep dish pizzas that disappear within two minutes of being near college students.