Learning for Control of Synthetic and Cyborg Insects in Uncertain Dynamic Environments

The objective of this research is to enable operation of synthetic and cyborg insects in complicated environments, such as outdoors or in a collapsed building. As the mobile platforms and environment have significant uncertainty, learning and adaptation capabilities are critical. Success in this research project will bring society closer to solving the grand challenge of teams of mobile, disposable, search and rescue robots which can robustly locomote through uncertain and novel environments, finding survivors in disaster situations, while removing risk from rescuers.