| Todd Murphey
Assistant
Professor
Dept.
of Mechanical Engineering
Northwestern University
2145 Sheridan Road, RM L192
Evanston, IL 60208-3111, USA
t-murphey@northwestern.edu
TEL:
847-491-8544
BS Mathematics, University of Arizona (1997)
PhD Control and Dynamic Systems, California Institute of Technology
(2002)
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Honors and Awards:
National Science Foundation CAREER award (2006)
Research Area:
Professor Murphey's research interests lie in the modeling and control of complex mechanisms that are high degree of freedom and involve mechanical contact. Examples include slip-steered vehicles, mechanical grasping with changing contact, and humanoid dynamics and control. The objective of Professor Murphey's research is to bring analytical methods traditionally reserved for low dimensional systems to these high dimensional settings, including optimal control synthesis, nonlinear controllability analysis, and reducibility analysis. Professor Murphey's research group is pursuing this goal through a combination of analytical, software, and experimental endeavors.
In the Classroom:
Professor Murphey developed a number of new courses at the University of Colorado; these include a control systems laboratory course, a dynamics course, a robotics course, and a freshman introduction to engineering course. He has worked extensively with companies, particularly National Instruments, to develop innovative courses. Professor Murphey also developed a freshman reading course in real analysis, using David Foster Wallace's "Everything And More: A Compact History Of Infinity." At Northwestern, he will teach one of the Engineering Analysis courses as well as courses in dynamics and control.
Software:
The trep software package: Software in C and Python to simulate constrained rigid body systems using variational integrators. Over time this software will include synthesis and analysis tools as well, including: linearization; second-order expansions; optimal control; spectral analysis; linear and nonlinear controllability; kinematic reducibility; nonlinear stability analysis..
Selected publications
E. Johnson and T. D. Murphey, Scalable variational integrators for constrained mechanical systems in generalized coordinates, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2008 (Submitted)
B. Shucker, T. D. Murphey, and J. Bennett, Convergence preserving switching for topology dependent decentralized systems, IEEE Transactions on Robotics, 2008 (Accepted for Publication)
T.D. Murphey and K.M. Lynch. Case Studies in Planar Part Feeding and Assembly Based on Design of Limit Sets. International Journal of Robotics Research, 2008 (Accepted for Publication)
M. Travers, T.D. Murphey, and L.Y. Pao. Data association with ambiguous targets. In American Controls Conference, 2008
T.D. Murphey. Filtering of interaction rules in cooperation. In American Controls Conference, 2008
M. Horowitz and T.D. Murphey. Adaptive Cooperative Manipulation with Intermittent Contact. In IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, 2008
E. Johnson and T.D. Murphey. Discrete and Continuous Mechanics for Tree Representations of Mechanical Systems. In IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation, 2008
T.D. Murphey and M. Egerstedt. Choreography for Marionettes: Imitation, Planning, and Control. In IEEE Int. Conf. on Intelligent and Robotic (IROS) Workshop on Art and Robotics, 2008
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