David Matthews

I'm a Ph.D. Student at Northwestern University in the Prof. Kriegman's Xenoobot Lab, where I work on AI robot design, and self-modeling.

Email / Scholar / Github

Research

My interests are broadly inspired by the beauty of the natural world. I wish to realize robots which are capable of self-modeling, self-repair, and self-improvement with the same creativity and diversity as living organisms. Rather than designing robots by hand to mimic nature, or mimiking the design algorithms of evolution by natural selection, I am interested in developing more efficient algorithms which can automatically design well-adapted robots to all sorts of environments and tasks. Some papers are highlighted.

	Evolution and learning in differentiable robots Luke Strgar, David Matthews, Tyler Hummer, Sam Kriegman Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS), 2024 cite / project page / code / paper
	Reinforcement learning for freeform robot design Muhan Li, David Matthews, Sam Kriegman IEEE ICRA, 2024 cite / paper
	Efficient automatic design of robots David Matthews, Andrew Spielberg, Daniela Rus, Sam Kriegman, Josh Bongard PNAS, 2023 cite / project page / code / paper
	Crowd grounding: finding semantic and behavioral alignment through human robot interaction. David Matthews, Josh Bongard Conf. on Artificial Life (ALIFE)., 2020 cite / code / paper
	Word2vec to behavior: morphology facilitates the grounding of language in machines. David Matthews, Sam Kriegman, Collin Cappelle, Josh Bongard IEEE IROS, 2019 cite / code / paper

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