We use control theory to move matter — without touching it. From microparticles steered by electric fields to robots that assemble themselves from modular blocks.
Magnetic, electric, acoustic, optical and magnetohydrodynamic manipulation — controlling motion of objects without physical contact, from microparticles to steel balls.
Modular voxel building blocks, morphing lattice structures, autonomous assembly robots — physical systems that reconfigure themselves.
We build real hardware. Levitating balls, air hockey robots, coil gun fountains, ferrofluid displays, Rijke tube organs — making control theory tangible.
Real-time optimization, data-driven methods, predictive control — the cross-cutting discipline that connects all our work.
A large-scale quadruped robot built to cut cost relative to commercial platforms, with kinematic and dynamic models validated against measurements from the physical machine. Three control schemes are developed — leg reference tracking, whole-body MPC, and a reinforcement-learning locomotion policy — with the simpler ones demonstrated on the robot.
Design and testing of dROBek, an inchworm-inspired autonomous robot that traverses and assembles cuboct voxel structures using cyclic gripper attachment, inverse kinematics, and A* path planning.
A gesture-controlled toy that motivates blind children to explore space and practice gross motor skills, built on the XIAO nRF52840 Sense with Zephyr RTOS. An on-device deep learning model recognizes seven gestures independently of the toy's orientation and answers with sound and haptics; four game modes, swappable covers, and an Android app for custom sounds came out of co-design with a blind family.
VoxLink, an FPGA-based hardware, firmware, and software stack that aggregates sensor data across voxel structures through a custom fly-by routing protocol. It reaches 21 Mbit/s with deterministic, low-latency polling — over 50 times the bandwidth of fast-mode I2C — and extends to LVDS signaling and USB 2.0 HS host communication.
Model predictive control for 3D printer hotend temperature that accounts for varying extrusion speeds, reducing filament overheating and underheating defects compared to standard PID control on the Prusa MK4S.
Active electromagnetic sensing integrated into cuboctahedron voxel faces, where electromagnets driven by DC-balanced Walsh-Hadamard CDMA sequences cancel static background fields such as the Earth's and let multiple nodes be distinguished at once. Levenberg-Marquardt localization on a custom tetrahedral magnetometer array holds sub-millimeter accuracy, generally under 0.2 mm.
Investigation of contactless MHD actuation for thermal management, combining an experimental platform with controllable heating/cooling, thermal imaging, and OpenFOAM simulations with Lorentz force modeling.
Development of a quadruped jumping robot built from modular digital material voxels, demonstrating the potential of discrete building blocks for real-world robotic applications.
A demonstrator system for stabilizing and controlling a ball on a 3DOF tilting platform, featuring mathematical modeling of ball dynamics and control algorithms for stabilization, trajectory tracking, and ball jumping.
An experimental magnetic levitation platform combining permanent magnets and electromagnetic coils with Hall-effect sensing and real-time PD control for stable 3-axis levitation with orientation control.
A testing platform for digital material (voxel) structures with beam-theory-based modeling, system identification, and feedback control for shape regulation of assembled structures.
Investigation of dynamic control capabilities of the KUKA LBR iiwa collaborative robot, comparing control frameworks (Sunrise Toolbox, FRI, ROS 2) and demonstrating oscillation regulation and ball bouncing.
Development of an experimental MHD platform with custom control boards for electrode voltage/current regulation and Particle Image Velocimetry for real-time flow measurement of conductive fluids.
Data-driven feedback control for shaping magnetohydrodynamic flow of conductive fluids, validated on an experimental setup with real-time PIV measurement and both simulation and hardware experiments.
Development of a control system for active metamaterial structures, addressing dynamic behavior and shape morphing of lattice-based building elements beyond their static structural properties.
A hybrid ball-and-beam demonstrator with three operational modes including a novel 'flying' mode, combining mathematical modeling, hardware modifications, and visualization for control education.
Design and implementation of control software and web interface for an automated 3D printer farm with robotic manipulation, enabling continuous unattended operation.
Investigation of acoustic manipulation capabilities of the Acouman platform for liquid and powder materials, using phase-controlled ultrasonic transducers to create shaped pressure fields.
A demonstration system for the MagMan platform that plays melodies on a xylophone using magnetically manipulated balls, and demonstrates translation and rotation of mechanically connected ball assemblies.
Collision-free and obstacle-aware trajectory planning algorithms for the MagMan distributed magnetic manipulation platform, based on nonlinear mathematical programming with path-generated initialization.
Design and prototyping of a ferrofluid display that manipulates ferrofluid in a liquid environment using magnetic fields, resulting in a fully functional visual display prototype.
Exploration of the Rijke tube thermoacoustic phenomenon as a musical instrument, applying modern control methods to both suppress and modulate sound generation for musical performance.
Construction of a coil gun that fires steel balls vertically using a two-coil acceleration system, with a three-coil electromagnetic deflection mechanism for trajectory control and automatic ball reloading.
Implementation of a locomotive simulator with a physical control panel connected to a dynamic computer model and model railroad, enabling realistic train operation simulation.
A custom modular position sensing system using 8x8 matrices of infrared emitters and detectors on 50x50 mm modules, designed for distributed manipulation platforms.
Design and construction of an affordable Rubik's Cube solving robot, combining robotics, computer vision for color recognition, and solving algorithms with a focus on simplicity and accessibility.
Continuation of the automatic control system for induction sintering at TESLA Electrontubes, further developing the control of extreme-condition processes for vacuum tube manufacturing.
Design of a locomotive simulator connecting a physical control panel to a computer model of train dynamics and a model railroad.
Design and construction of a system for air levitation of multiple ping-pong balls in a tube, with Arduino-based feedback control using range sensors and a mathematical model of the system dynamics.
An autonomous air-hockey player using camera-based puck localization, trajectory prediction with a mathematical motion model, and stepper-motor-driven game strategies.
Innovation of the MagMan platform with a Raspberry Pi-based compact control solution replacing the PC, Simulink model deployment, and fabrication of new modules with current measurement for a larger platform.
Development of an embedded control system for a hybrid-electric power unit for UAVs, including a mathematical model, controller design, and integration with the Flydeo onboard system.
Automatic control system for an induction sintering oven at TESLA Electrontubes, operating at temperatures up to 1700 °C and high vacuum for manufacturing electron tube components.
An embedded system that receives ADS-B signals from aircraft, plots them on a map, and automatically tracks and records selected planes using GPS positioning and motorized camera control.
Development of a Java-based software tool for real-time data acquisition and processing from a multichannel scintillation detector used in anti-neutrino research, sampling at 100 MSPS.
A novel mobile-robot-based testbed for simulating microgravity and low-gravity conditions, enabling time-unlimited experiments with lower inertia compared to conventional air-bearing facilities.
A novel dielectrophoresis-based micromanipulation platform capable of manipulating both liquid droplets and solid microbeads, demonstrating automated 2D positioning with visual feedback and trajectory planning.
Extension of the MagMan magnetic manipulation platform with a 3D-printed non-planar surface, enabling motion control of steel balls on curved terrain using Lagrangian dynamics for nonholonomic systems.
Design of a real-time optimization-based control system for contactless dielectrophoretic manipulation, extending actuation to both amplitude and phase-shift control of voltage signals.
An application that measures where a 3D printer's extruder actually is, using an ordinary USB camera and a PC. Colored markers on each axis are detected and geometrically transformed into printer coordinates, which catches the skipped stepper-motor steps that silently ruin a print; the thesis measures how accurately the detected position tracks the real one.
Non-contact planar manipulation of micro- and mesoscopic objects on a commercially available matrix microelectrode array. Method-of-moments simulation models were used to tune simple position controllers and verified by manipulating polystyrene microbeads — which first required solving how to contact the array with the voltage generator.
Two ways optics meets dielectrophoresis. First, a laboratory setup for optically induced DEP, where projected light patterns replace fixed electrodes and move microparticles contactlessly. Second, a cheap lensless CMOS sensor as optical feedback: it resolves objects down to 5 µm such as yeast cells, and drives feedback manipulation of 50-µm beads about as accurately as a bulky microscope-and-camera combination.
A four-sector microelectrode array that moves polystyrene beads of 10 to 250 µm through deionized water by dielectrophoresis. The sector layout keeps fabrication cheap while still allowing a wide range of planar motions; the instrumentation and motion-planning strategies were demonstrated at the NIST Mobile Microrobotics Challenge 2012 at ICRA in St. Paul.
A model of a magnetic platform for distributed planar manipulation — an array of coils under a resistive touch layer, with a steel ball riding on the foil. The model is deliberately reduced to one coil and one-dimensional motion, derived both by experimental identification and from physical laws, and then used for basic position control of the ball.
A simulation of how microscopic particles behave under dielectrophoretic forces, built as groundwork for feedback control. A hybrid scheme precomputes the field in COMSOL and runs the particle simulation in Matlab, which avoids repeating the same field solves; the results are checked against analytical solutions and laboratory experiments.