MRI Powered and Guided Tetherless Effectors for Localized Therapeutic Interventions

Aaron Becker's passion is robotics and control. Currently as an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Houston, he is building a robotics lab. Aaron was awarded the NSF CAREER in 2016 to study massive manipulation with swarms: using a shared input to drive large populations of robots to arbitrary goal states. Becker won the Best Paper award at IROS 2014. Previously as a Research Fellow in a joint appointment with Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School, he implemented robotics powered and controlled by the magnetic field of an MRI, as a member of the Pediatric Cardiac Bioengineering Lab with Pierre Dupont. As a Postdoctoral Research Associate at Rice University in the Multi-Robot Systems Lab with James McLurkin, Aaron investigated control of distributed systems and nanorobotics with experts in the fields. His online game http://swarmcontrol.net seeks to understand the best ways to control a swarm of robots by a human. The project achieves this through a community of game-developed experts. Aaron earned his PhD in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.