The Maryland Robotics Center is an interdisciplinary research center housed in the Institute for Systems Research within the A. James Clark School of Engineering. The mission of the center is to advance robotic systems, underlying component technologies, and applications of robotics through research and educational programs that are interdisciplinary in nature and based on a systems approach.

The center's research activities include all aspects of robotics including development of component technologies (e.g., sensors, actuators, structures, and communication), novel robotic platforms, and intelligence and autonomy for robotic systems. The center consists of faculty members spanning the following academic departments:

• Aerospace Engineering
• Bioengineering
• Biology
• Civil and Environmental Engineering
• Computer Science
• Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Kinesiology
• Mechanical Engineering

Research projects in the center are supported by the major federal funding agencies including NSF, ARO, ARL, ONR, AFOSR, NIH, DARPA, NASA, and NIST.

Current Research Areas

• Collaborative, Cooperative, Networked Robotics
  Bio-inspired robotics concepts, time-delayed robotics, robotic swarms, robotic cooperation under limited communication, distributed robotics, crowd and multi-agent simulation.
• Medical Robotics
  MRI-compatible surgical robotics, haptics-enabled AFM, exoskeletons for rehabilitation, and magnetic micromanipulation for drug delivery.
• Miniature Robotics
  Mesoscale robots; bio-inspired sensing, actuation, and locomotion; cell manipulation (optical, AFM based, and micro fluidics); and micro and nano manipulation (optical and magnetic).
• Robotics for Extreme Environments
  Space robotics and autonomous deep-submergence sampling systems.
• Unmanned Vehicle
  Micro air vehicles, unmanned sea surface vehicles, unmanned underwater vehicles, and planetary surface rovers; robot motion planning.
• Bio-Inspired Robotics
  Robots inspired by biological forms. Bio-inspired design and manufacturing, artificial muscles, adaptive control of bio-inspired robots, biosensors, soft robots, swarming, co-robotics, multifunctional materials and structures, biomaterials, biolocomotion, energy harvesting, autonomy, humanoid robots, modular robots.
• Cognitive Robotics
  Endowing a robot with intelligent behavior by providing it with a processing architecture that allows it to learn and reason about how to behave in response to complex goals in a complex world. Cognitive robots integrate perception, cognition and action.
• Social Robotics
  Human-robot collaboration, human behavior modeling, human-robot communication, learning and cognition, planning and re-planning, management of trust and its effects on collaboration.

Derek A. Paley Willis H. Young Jr. Professor of Aerospace Engineering Education 301-405-5757 | dpaley@umd.edu Profile