Research

Recent Projects

Social Robots

The goal of this project is to design robots that interact with each other, with animals, and with humans. Rather than programming fixed outcomes, this project harnesses emergence as a generative principle, engineering local interaction rules that give rise to interesting, remarkable, and unusual (Olkowski, 2011) behaviors that transcend the predictable.

Collective Dynamics

How do global behaviors arise from local interactions? We approach this question developing frameworks that bridge individual robot rules and population-level phenomena. This work spans thermodynamic models of active matter, large language models (LLMs) as high-level swarm controllers, and mean-field approaches to derive the emergent statistical mechanics of robot collectives from first principles.