SEAS graduate student wins best student paper at RSS 2010

Pratheev Sreetharan '06 (Physics), a graduate student in the Microrobotics Lab at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), won the best student paper award at the 2010 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference.

RSS brings together researchers working on algorithmic or mathematical foundations of robotics, robotics applications, and analysis of robotic systems.

The 2010 conference was held at the Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) during June 27-30.

Sreetharan's winning paper, "Passive torque regulation in an underactuated flapping wing robotic insect," focused on mechanical intelligence for passive control of body torques in our robotic flies.

"RSS is arguably the most prestigious conference in all of robotics and certainly one of the most selective with a mere 16.7% acceptance rate," said Robert Wood, Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering, head of the Microrobotics Lab, and Sreetharan's adviser.

Prior to joining Wood's lab, Sreetharan, who studied physics as an undergraduate at Harvard College, was a physicist and technical consultant at Thermo Electron where he conducted research on advanced concepts in scientific instrument design, including data analysis, optical emission spectroscopy (OES) algorithm development, programming, and electronic hardware design.

He also spent three-and-a-half years working in Professor Paul Horowitz's lab in the Harvard Physics Department. He primarily focused on developing telescope instrumentation electronics for the All-Sky survey. This experiment, part of Optical SETI, searches for nanosecond pulsed laser communication.