UCSB Engineering

Katie Byl

Assistant Professor

Contacts

5115 Harold Frank Hall (office)
ECE Dept., University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9560

tel: 805/893-4924
katiebyl@ece.ucsb.edu

Personal web site

LittleDog climbing steps

Motion planning enables this high gear-ratio robot to lunge reliably over obstacles. (LittleDog robot is a product of Boston Dynamics.)

Research Description

My research interests are robot dynamics and control: particularly, locomotion and manipulation. Developing robots that are agile, reliable and safe depends directly on addressing the challenges of underactuation and stochasticity that are inherently present in real-world robot interactions both with the environment and with humans. My work focuses on modeling and controlling such dynamics. Example applications include autonomous (MAV) flight, rough-terrain walking and dextrous manipulation.

Research Groups

• Robotics Lab

Biography

Katie Byl received her S.B., S.M., and Ph.D. degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT. Her research is in dynamic systems and control, with particular interest in modeling and control techniques to deal with the inherent challenges of underactuation and stochasticity that characterize bio-inspired robot locomotion and manipulation in real-world environments. Katie has worked on a wide range of research topics in the control of dynamic systems, including magnetic bearing control, flapping-wing microrobotics, piezoelectic noise cancellation for aircraft, and vibration isolation for gravity wave detection, and she was once a professional gambler on the now-infamous MIT Blackjack Team. She is the recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship in Neuroscience (2011) and of the Regents' Junior Faculty Fellowship (2011).

Affiliations

• Center for Control, Dynamical Systems and Computation (CCDC)

Awards/Honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship in Neuroscience, 2011
• Regents' Junior Faculty Fellowship, 2011

Selected Publications