Super excited to be starting the spring semester in a new job as an associate professor of AeroAstro at MIT @mitaeroastro.bsky.social. I'm teaching Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, which I'll be posting online if anyone wants to follow along: github.com/zacmancheste...
Sorry I missed this... We submitted a registration to Space-Track and sent them GPS data early in the mission. I don't recall getting reliably cataloged while we were doing ops and I spent a lot of time fitting our own TLEs to our GPS data. The satellites most definitely reentered over a year ago.
Recent PhD grad Mitch Fogelson presenting results from our ZeroG flight testing complex spinning deployable structures and validating our Dojo simulator
PhD student Fausto Vega presenting his work on collision avoidance maneuver planning for spacecraft at the ISpaRo conference in Sendai. This work is super nice because we found a convex optimization formulation of the problem that comes with safety, performance, and convergence guarantees.
Talking about our lab's recent smallsat missions at the AI4SPACE workshop at ISpaRo in Sendai, Japan
Biped walking from left to right across (top) flat, (middle) sinusoidal, and (bottom) piecewise linear terrain using the same policy.
This T-RO paper will be presented at #ICRA2025 develops a Contact-Implicit MPC method for controlling #robots making/breaking contact. The bilevel planner uses LCPs to reason about contact timing/forces online, generating new contact modes in real-time.
ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/103...
Did a fun lecture this week on data-drive control with hints of behavior cloning and diffusion policies, but all grounded in classical linear systems theory. Most of the ideas are drawn from the behavioral control theory literature: youtu.be/fnajY4Ip13w?...
Had a great visit to MIT for the robotics seminar a couple of weeks ago: www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSle...
Just made first contact with our satellite PROMETHEUS-1 in collaboration with @cmurexlab.bsky.social @istecnico.bsky.social @uminho.bsky.social @cmurobotics.bsky.social @scsatcmu.bsky.social
See where our satellite is here: tinygs.com/satellite/PR...
It's difficult to convey how amazing Jonathan's collection is. This is truly a treasure that every space nerd should support.
Cool work by my student @fogmb.bsky.social trying to scale joint robot design and control optimization to realistic problems. These are super challenging optimization problems that are often handled separately by expert designers. We're trying to automate it.
🚀 Co-Optimizing Robots for Performance 🚀
🌟 CAPO: A scalable optimization method:
✅ Jointly optimizes actuators & control traj.
✅ Scales to complex systems
✅ Finds robust, efficient designs
🏋️ Tested on:
🚁 Multirotors 🛰️ Space structures 🧥 Cloth 🐟 Soft robots
📄 rexlab.ri.cmu.edu/papers/CAPO_...
End of an era as Kevin Tracy defends his PhD. Kevin has been with the lab since the very beginning at Stanford, through the move to CMU. He's done amazing optimization-based control work with applications spanning aerospace and robotics and it has been an absolute pleasure working with him.
