M. Ani Hsieh
Deputy Director, GRASP Lab; Graduate Program Chair, ROBO; Associate Professor, MEAM
Ani is interested in problems that lie at the intersection of robotics, dynamical systems theory, and control. Her work focuses on how robots interact with their environments and how the environment can be leveraged as an energy reservoir for robots. Ani and her group create new abstractions to describe dynamic environments and design new architectures and algorithms for teams of robots to interact with each other and their environments. Her work is very interdisciplinary with a strong emphasis on experimental validation.
Research Areas
- Complex Systems
- Data-Driven Modeling and Estimation
- Distributed and Decentralized Control
- Modular Self-reconfigurable Robots
- Networked Robots
- Swarm Robots
- Distributed Sensing and Estimation
Research Groups
Projects
Publications
Multi-robot Multi-source Localization in Complex Flows with Physics-Preserving Environment Models
Publisher arXiv
Probabilistic multi-robot planning with temporal tasks and communication constraints
Publisher Springer Nature
A Human-in-the-Loop Metaheuristic Approach to Multiobjective Path Planning
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)
Online Adaptation for Flying Quadrotors in Tight Formations
Publisher ArXiv
Publisher International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
EvMAPPER: High-Altitude Orthomapping with Event Cameras
Publisher ICRA
Deploying Foundation Model-Enabled Air and Ground Robots in the Field: Challenges and Opportunities
Publisher IEEE ICRA Workshop on Field Robotics
Effect of Jet Coordination on Underwater Propulsion with the Multi-Robot SALP System
Publisher International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft)
Spectrally informed learning of fluid flows
Publisher Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science
Looking into the Shadow: Recording a Total Solar Eclipse with High-resolution Event Cameras
Publisher CVPR
Coupled jet coordination and physical arrangement in salp-inspired multi-robot swimming
Publisher Bioinspiration & Biomimetics
A Macroscopic Ensemble Modeling Approach to Collaborative Task Assignment in Dynamic Environments
Publisher DARS
Knowledge-based Neural Ordinary Differential Equations for Cosserat Rod-based Soft Robots
Publisher ArXiv
Uncertainty quantification and robustification of model-based controllers using conformal prediction
Publisher Learning for Dynamics & Control Conference
Challenges and Opportunities for Large-Scale Exploration with Air-Ground Teams using Semantics
Publisher ArXiv
Inferring bifurcation diagrams with transformers
Publisher Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science
Publisher IEEE, IROS
Energy-efficient Team Orienteering Problem in the Presence of Time-Varying Ocean Currents
Publisher IROS
Trajectory Planning for the Bidirectional Quadrotor as a Differentially Flat Hybrid System
Publisher IEEE
M3ED: Multi-Robot, Multi-Sensor, Multi-Environment Event Dataset
Publisher 2023 IEEE/CVF conference on computer vision and pattern recognition workshops (CVPRW)
Flow-Based Rendezvous and Docking for Marine Modular Robots in Gyre-Like Environments
Publisher ICRA
Energy-efficient Orienteering Problem in the Presence of Ocean Currents
Publisher IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Learning and Leveraging Features in Flow-Like Environments to Improve Situational Awareness
Publisher IEEE
Flow-Based Control of Marine Robots in Gyre-Like Environments
Publisher International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Stochastic Nonlinear Ensemble Modeling and Control for Robot Team Environmental Monitoring
Publisher arXiv
Publisher CVPR
Towards Understanding Underwater Weather Events in Rivers Using Autonomous Surface Vehicles
Publisher OCEANS 2022
Publisher ICRA
KNODE-MPC: A Knowledge-Based Data-Driven Predictive Control Framework for Aerial Robots
Publisher IEEE
EV-Catcher: High-Speed Object Catching Using Low-Latency Event-Based Neural Networks
Publisher IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Publisher arXiv
Modular Robot Formation and Routing for Resilient Consensus
Publisher IEEE American Control Conference (ACC)
Nonlinear Synchronization Control for Short-Range Mobile Sensors Drifting in Geophysical Flows
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
A Topological Approach to Path Planning for a Magnetic Millirobot
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Adaptive Sampling and Reduced-Order Modeling of Dynamic Processes by Robot Teams
Publisher IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Coordination of multiple AGVs: a quadratic optimization method
Publisher Autonomous Robots
Evaluating the effectiveness of perspective aware planning with panoramas
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Low-Range Interaction Periodic Rendezvous Along Lagrangian Coherent Structures
Publisher IEEE American Control Conference (ACC)
Synchronous Rendezvous for Networks of Marine Robots in Large Scale Ocean Monitoring
Publisher Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Team composition for perimeter defense with patrollers and defenders
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Using Control to Shape Stochastic Escape and Switching Dynamics
Publisher Chaos 29
Publisher IEEE American Control Conference (ACC)
Experiments and open-loop control of multiple catalytic microrobots
Publisher Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics (JMBR)
Exploiting Stochasticity for Navigation in Gyre Flows
Publisher Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS)
Going with the flow: a graph based approach to optimal path planning in general flows
Publisher Autonomous Robots
Information based exploration with panoramas and angle occupancy grids
Publisher Springer
Modelling and Simultaneous Control of Multiple Catalytic Microrobots
Publisher Journal of Micro-Bio Robotics (JMBR)
Neural Network Aided Information Theoretic Exploration
Publisher IEEE International Symposium on Safety, Security, and Rescue Robotics (SSRR)
Optimal path planning in time-varying flows using adaptive discretization
Publisher IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L)
Optimal Path Planning in Time-Varying Flows with Forecasting Uncertainties
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Cooperative prediction of time-varying boundaries with a team of robots
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
Cooperative transport of a buoyant load: A differential geometric approach
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Publisher IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering (T-ASE)
Information theoretic source seeking strategies for multiagent plume tracking in turbulent fields
Publisher Journal of Marine Science and Engineering
Intrusion detection for stochastic task allocation in robot swarms
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Optimal paths for polygonal robots in SE(2)
Publisher ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering (IDETC/CIE)
The Impact of Diversity on Optimal Control Policies for Heterogeneous Robot Swarms
Publisher IEEE Transactions on Robotics
Tracking attracting manifolds in flows
Publisher Autonomous Robots
A triangle histogram for object classification by tactile sensing
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)
Adaptive distribution of a swarm of heterogeneous robots
Publisher Acta Polytechnica
Formalizing the impact of diversity on performance in a heterogeneous swarm of robots
Publisher IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
Fast redistribution of a swarm of heterogeneous robots
Publisher EAI International Conference on Bio-inspired Information and Communications Technologies (BICT)
Special Issue on the 14th International Symposium on Experimental Robotics, 2014
Publisher International Journal of Robotics Research (IJRR)
Development of top-down analysis of distributed assembly tasks
Publisher Proceedings of the 9th Workshop on Performance Metrics for Intelligent Systems
Maintaining network connectivity and performance in robot teams
Publisher Journal of field robotics
Adaptive teams of autonomous aerial and ground robots for situational awareness
Publisher Journal of field robotics
Towards the deployment of a mobile robot network with end-to-end performance guarantees
Publisher ICRA
Deploying Air-Ground Multi-Robot Teams in Urban Environments
Publisher Multi-Robot Systems. From Swarms to Intelligent Automata Volume III: Proceedings from the 2005 International Workshop on Multi-Robot Systems
News
GRASP News
Robots in the Reading Room: GRASP Lab Brings Hands-On STEM to Roxborough Library
April 21, 2025
Alumni News
Faculty News
GRASP News
Student News
Highlights from GRASP at CoRL 2022
December 20, 2022
Alumni News
Faculty News
AI for Good – Collective robotics: Multi-robot coordination in complex environments
December 9, 2022
GRASP News
October 10, 2017
Alumni News
March 30, 2012
Ph.D. Students
Alumni
Dr. Ani Hsieh and ScalAR Lab
Research Areas
- Complex Systems
- Data-Driven Modeling and Estimation
- Distributed and Decentralized Control
- Modular Self-reconfigurable Robots
- Networked Robots
- Swarm Robots
- Distributed Sensing and Estimation