ECE 4960/5960, Teaching Team Spring 2022

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.

Jonathan Jaramillo

Jonathan is an ECE graduate student working in the Collective Embodied Intelligence Lab under Kirstin Petersen. Having grown up near Ithaca, his research is focused on developing computer vision systems to help improve vineyard management techniques for grape growers here in the Finger Lakes region, and around the world. When he’s not in the vineyard collecting data or testing a new computer vision system, he can often be found in the lab tinkering with robots or developing CV systems for studying social insect behavior. Jonathan received a Bachelor of Science in physics and computer science from Houghton College and spent some time working as a systems engineer for Lockheed Martin.

Jade Pinkenburg

TBD!

Aratrika Ghatak

TBD!