Bruce Randall Donald
Associate Professor
PhD MIT, 1987

My interests include robotics, microelectromechanical systems, computational geometry and artificial intelligence. Robotics is the science that seeks to forge an intelligent, computational connection between perception and action.

Working with graduate student Jim Jennings, research associate Daniela Rus, graduate student Russell Brown, and lab alumnus Jonathan Rees (now at MIT), we developed a team of autonomous mobile robots that can perform sophisticated distributed manipulation tasks (such as moving furniture). The robots run robust SPMD protocols that are completely asynchronous and require no communication. With graduate student Karl Böhringer, EE Professor Noel MacDonald, and postdoctoral associate Rob Mihailovich, we are building a massively parallel array of microactuators in the Cornell National Nanofabrication Laboratory. The array contains over 100 actuators in 1 square millimeter and can orient small parts without sensory feedback. Our microfabricated actuator arrays could be used to construct programmable parts-feeders (at any scale) or to build self-propelled IC's (walking VLSI chips). Graduate student Amy Briggs worked with Dan Huttenlocher's vision group to develop a sensor planning and surveillance system for a team of mobile robots. The robots use onboard vision to detect and intercept targets in the lab. Graduate student David Chang completed a new result intended to place computational topology on a firm algorithmic footing. We developed a randomized algorithm to compute the integral homology of a simplicial complex in expected quadratic time (in the geometric complexity).

University Activities

• Director, Computer Science Department Master of Engineering Program
• Chair, Computer Science Department Master of Engineering Curriculum Committee
• Chair, Computer Science Department Master of Engineering Admissions Committee
• Co-Director, Cornell Robotics and Vision Laboratory
• Applied Mathematics Computing Resources Committee
• College of Engineering Graduate and Professional Programs Committee

Professional Activities

• Editor, IEEE Transactions on Robotics
• Member, NSF Advisory Panels
• Member, Impact Task Force on Computational Geometry.
• Organizing Committee, AAAI 1994, Spring Symposium Series, Stanford University Special Symposium on ÒDetecting and Resolving Errors in Manufacturing SystemsÓ

Awards

• National Science Foundation Presidential Young Investigator Award (1989-1994)

Lectures

• A theory of manipulation and control for microfabricated actuator arrays. National Science Foundation, Washington, D.C., October 21, 1993.
• Manipulation and control of microfabricated actuator arrays. Air Force Office of Sponsored Research, Washington, D.C., October 22, 1993.
• Distributed manipulation using mobots and MEMS. UCLA Computer Science Colloquium, Los Angeles, CA, 1995.
• Distributed manipulation using massively parallel micro-fabricated actuator arrays. Berkeley Engineering Systems Colloquium, Berkeley, CA, 1995.
• Small and large: distributed robotic manipulation. Computer Science Department, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, March 1995.
• Model-based geometric algorithms for animation and multimedia. Interval Research, Palo Alto, CA, February 1995.
• Large and small: distributed robotic manipulation. SRI, Menlo Park, CA, December 1994.
• Sensorless manipulation using massively parallel micro-fabricated actuator arrays. Xerox PARC, Palo Alto, CA, December 1994.
• Distributed robotic manipulation, large or small. Computer Science Department, Dartmouth College, November 1994.
• ___. Computer Science Department, U. C. Berkeley, November 1994.
• ___. Robotics Laboratory, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, October 1994.

Publications

• Information invariants in robotics. Artificial Intelligence 72, 1 and 2 (Jan. 1995), 217-304.
• Information invariants for distributed manipulation. The First Workshop on the Algorithmic Foundations of Robotics, A. K. Peters, Boston, MA, ed. K. Goldberg, R. Wilson, and J.-C. Latombe (February 1995), (with J. Jennings and D. Rus).
• Moving furniture with teams of autonomous mobile robots. Proceedings IEEE/Robotics Society of Japan International Workshop on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Pittsburgh, PA, (June 1995), (with J. Jennings and D. Rus).
• Distributed robotic manipulation: experiments in minimalism. International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, Stanford, CA, (June 1995).

1994-1995 Annual Report Home Page

Departmental Home Page

If you have questions or comments please contact: www@cs.cornell.edu.

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Last modified: 24 November 1995 by Denise Moore (denise@cs.cornell.edu).