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.