Elizabeth Farrell Helbling

Biography

Countless science fiction works have set our expectations for small, mobile, autonomous robots for use in a broad range of applications. The ability to move through highly dynamic and complex environments can expand capabilities in search and rescue operations and safety inspection tasks. These robots can also form a diverse collective to provide more flexibility than a multifunctional robot. Advances in multi-scale manufacturing and the proliferation of small electronic devices have paved the way to realizing this vision with centimeter-scale robots. However, there remain significant challenges in making these highly-articulated mechanical devices fully autonomous due to the severe mass and power constraints. Helbling’s research looks at the integration of the control system, sensors, and power electronics within the strict weight and power constraints of these vehicles, taking a holistic approach to navigating the inherent tradeoffs in each component in terms of their size, mass, power, and computation requirements.

Farrell did her postdoctoral work at Harvard University and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering with Professor Wood. She completed her graduate work with Professor Wood in 2019, where she focused on the systems-level design of the Harvard RoboBee, an insect-scale flapping-wing robot, and HAMR, a bio-inspired crawling robot. Her work on the first autonomous flight of a centimeter-scale vehicle was recently featured on the cover of Nature, and can be seen at the Boston Museum of Science, World Economic Forum, London Science Museum, and the Smithsonian, as well as in the popular press (The New York Times, PBS NewsHour, Science Friday, and the BBC). She received her bachelor’s degree in engineering sciences at Smith College.

Research Interests

• Robotics and Autonomy
• Biomechanics and Mechanobiology
• Computer Engineering