Nils Napp

About

Nils Napp is an Assistant Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Cornell University, located in Rhodes Hall, Room 334. His research focuses on design and control strategies for systems that operate with uncertainty, drawing inspiration from evolved biological systems that function reliably in cluttered, unstructured, and fluctuating environments without relying on global information, planning, or communication. His work emphasizes principles such as self-organization, managing noise created by interacting components, and utilizing distributed reactive behaviors as feedback to adapt strategies. In his group, these biological guiding principles are applied to develop algorithms and build robots capable of operating reliably in messy and unstructured real-world environments.

Research topics

• Computer science
• Artificial intelligence
• Distributed computing
• Theoretical computer science
• Computer vision

Selected publications

• Imperfect comb construction reveals the architectural abilities of honeybees

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2021-07-26 · 44 citations

  articleOpen access

  Honeybees are renowned for their perfectly hexagonal honeycomb, hailed as the pinnacle of biological architecture for its ability to maximize storage area while minimizing building material. However, in natural nests, workers must regularly transition between different cell sizes, merge inconsistent combs, and optimize construction in constrained geometries. These spatial obstacles pose challenges to workers building perfect hexagons, but it is unknown to what extent workers act as architects ve…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• ACHORD: Communication-Aware Multi-Robot Coordination With Intermittent Connectivity

  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters · 2022-07-22 · 36 citations

  articleOpen access

  Communication is an important capability for multi-robot exploration because (1) inter-robot communication (comms) improves coverage efficiency and (2) robot-to-base comms improves situational awareness. Exploring comms-restricted (e.g., subterranean) environments requires a multi-robot system to tolerate and anticipate intermittent connectivity, and to carefully consider comms requirements, otherwise mission-critical data may be lost. In this paper, we describe and analyze ACHORD (Autonomous &…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Honey bees and social wasps reach convergent architectural solutions to nest-building problems

  PLoS Biology · 2023-07-27 · 16 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  The hexagonal cells built by honey bees and social wasps are an example of adaptive architecture; hexagons minimize material use, while maximizing storage space and structural stability. Hexagon building evolved independently in the bees and wasps, but in some species of both groups, the hexagonal cells are size dimorphic-small worker cells and large reproductive cells-which forces the builders to join differently sized hexagons together. This inherent tiling problem creates a unique opportunity…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Planning for Robotic Dry Stacking with Irregular Stones

  Springer proceedings in advanced robotics · 2021-01-01 · 14 citations

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Stability-Based Sequence Planning for Robotic Dry-Stacking of Natural Stones

  IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters · 2023-08-02 · 9 citations

  articleSenior author

  The ability to autonomously build strong, dry-stacked structures with in-situ objects would enable new robotic applications in disaster response and remote site preparation. Previous works have demonstrated that heuristics adapted from masonry manuals allow robots to build freestanding dry-stacked structures but have failed to evaluate the strength of the structures. In this letter, we focus on the stability of the dry-stacked structures in both simulation and physical implementation. To estimat…

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Abstraction Barriers for Embodied Algorithms

  NSF · $419k · 2019–2021

Frequent coauthors

• Kirstin Petersen

  Cornell University

  13 shared

• Eric Klavins

  University of Washington

  13 shared

• Vivek Thangavelu

  9 shared

• Radhika Nagpal

  Princeton University

  8 shared

• Frank Schoeneman

  University at Buffalo, State University of New York

  6 shared

• Michael L. Smith

  Auburn University

  6 shared

• Varun Chandola

  6 shared

• Samuel A. Burden

  University of Washington

  6 shared

Awards & honors

• Ten assistant professors win NSF early-career awards

Similar researchers at Cornell University

• Fengqi Youh-83
• Stephen B. Popeh-83
• Rebecca J. Barthelmieh-62