Tony G. Chen

I will be starting as an Assistant Professor at Georgia Tech in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering in 2025. In the meantime, I am a postdoc with Prof. Rob Wood at Harvard. I graduated with my Ph.D. from Stanford University in Mechanical Engineering, in BDML advised by Prof. Mark R. Cutkosky. My research focuses on mechanically embodied intelligence mechanism design for field robotics.

Mechanism Design · Field Robotics · Bio-inspired Design · Grasping

Research

My research interest lies in equipping robotic platforms with the capability to interact with the environment forcefully. This is often done by looking at the required contact dynamics between the robot and the environment, such as friction, and various means to augment this friction such as through different types of adhesion and the dynamic nature of the interaction such as energy dissipation and energy harvesting. I often look to nature and biology for inspiration for these mechanism designs and also use robots to study nature and biology.

Awards

2023 Living Machines #2 Best Poster Award

2022 IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine (RAM) Best Paper Award

2022 IEEE IROS Best Mechanisms and Design Award

2022 IEEE IROS Workshop: Agile Robotics: Perception, Learning and Control, Best Paper Award

2022 IEEE ICRA Workshop: New Frontier in Parallel Robotics - Best Selected Abstract

National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellow

NASA Academy in Robotics Graduate

About Me

I received my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Georgia Tech in 2017 and my M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford University in 2023. I am currently continuing my work at Stanford as a postdoc for the next year while I look for faculty and additional post-doc opportunities. I was an intern at NASA Marshall Space and Flight Center (MSFC) in 2016 and at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in 2017. Throughout the first two years of my Ph.D., I served as the primary Payload Developer for a NASA Astrobee gripper that was launched to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2019. In my spare time, I love spending time with my dog, Tofu, hiking, backpacking, skiing, and playing video games.

Publications

T. G. Chen, S. Newdick, J. Di, C. Bosio, N. Ongole, M. Lapotre, M. Pavone, M. R. Cutkosky. "ReachBot: Locomotion as Manipulation for Planetary Cave Exploration," In review, Science Robotics, 2023.

J. Zhou*, T. G. Chen*, Y. Tsurimaki, A. Hajj-Ahmad, L. Fan, Y. Peng, R. Xu, Y. Wu, S. Assawaworrarit, S. Fan, M.R. Cutkosky, Y. Cui. "Angle-selective thermal emitter for directional radiative cooling and heating", Joules, 2023.

T. G. Chen, B. C. Goolsby, G. Bernal, L. A. O'Connell, M. R. Cutkosky. "Feed Me: Robotic Infiltration of Poison Frog Families," Living Machines, the 12th International Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems, 2023.

P. J. Yang, T. G. Chen, S. B. Bracher, A. Hui, and D. L. Hu, “Urinary flow through urethras with a rough lumen,” Neurourology and Urodynamics, 2023.

T. G. Chen, K. A. Hoffmann, J. E. Low, K. Nagami, D. Lentink, and M. R. Cutkosky, “Aerial grasping and the velocity sufficiency region,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 10 009–10 016, 2022.

T. G. Chen, A. Cauligi, S. A. Suresh, M. Pavone, and M. Cutkosky, “Testing gecko-inspired adhesives with Astrobee aboard the international space station: Readying the technology for space,” IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 2022.

S. Newdick, N. Ongole, T. G. Chen, E. Schmerling, M. R. Cutkosky, and M. Pavone, “Motion planning for a climbing robot with stochastic grasps,” Submitted to IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2022.

S. Newdick, T. G. Chen, B. Hockman, M. R. Cutkosky, and M. Pavone, “Design process for ReachBot with a case study mission to a martian lava tube,” Submitted to IEEE AeroCon, 2022.

K. A. Hoffmann, T. G. Chen, M. R. Cutkosky, and D. Lentink, “Bird-inspired robotics principles as a framework for developing smart aerospace materials,” Submitted to Journal of Composite Materials, 2022

S. Schneider, A. Bylard, T. G. Chen, P. Wang, M. Cutkosky, and M. Pavone, “Reachbot: A small robot for large mobile manipulation tasks,” IEEE AeroCon, 2021.

T. G. Chen, B. Miller, C. Winston, S. Schneider, A. Bylard, M. Pavone, and M. R. Cutkosky, “Reachbot: A small robot with exceptional reach for rough terrain,” in 2022 International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE, 2022, pp. 4517–4523.

D. Hirano, N. Tanishima, A. Bylard, and T. G. Chen, “Underactuated gecko adhesive gripper for simple and versatile grasp,” in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE, 2020, pp. 8964–8969.

A. Cauligi, T. G. Chen, S. A. Suresh, M. Dille, R. G. Ruiz, A. M. Vargas, M. Pavone, and M. Cutkosky, “Design and development of a gecko-adhesive gripper for the Astrobee free-flying robot,” arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.09151, 2020.

T. M. Huh, C. Liu, J. Hashizume, T. G. Chen, S. A. Suresh, F.-K. Chang, and M. R. Cutkosky, “Active sensing for measuring contact of thin film gecko-inspired adhesives,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 3, no. 4, pp. 3263–3270, 2018