John Rieffel

Tufts Biomimetic Devices Laboratory

"The Biological Isn't Logical"

Design tends to follow the leading technical products of
its period; in an age of aviation, even pencil-sharpeners
are streamlined. Given this longstanding trend, the
coming bio-genetic technical revolution should produce a
biomorphic epoch in 21st century design. But the living
world was not designed by a teleological, rationalist,
reductionist process. The living world grew irrationally
through non-systematic, genetic exploration of niche
possibilities, pruned back by natural selection and
occasional massive disasters. So if you're building
distributed networks, learn from crabgrass.

From The Viridian Design Principles 1.0

Orgel's Second Rule: Evolution is cleverer than you are.
Francis Crick (via Dan Dennet)

I am a Postdoctoral Associate in Barry Trimmer's Biomimetic Devices Laboratory at Tufts University. I am interested in exploring how complex systems, both natural and artifical, can exploit complex dynamical interactions to their advantage.

I received my Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 2006. My Ph.D. Thesis can be found here

Subsequently, I held a postdoc at Cornell University, working on designing and building light weight, foldable, tensegrity-based robots.

Current Work:

I am currently working on the simulation and control of novel soft robots inspired by the Manduca sexta caterpillar.

Below is an evolved gait of a six-segment soft-bodied robot developed within the PhysX physics environment. The red line in the top right indicates the absolute displacement of a leading vertex of the robot.

You might notice some similarity between the softbot gait, and the evolved gait for a large, irregular tensegrity robot that I evolved using ODE:

This similarity is due to the fact that both robots are highly dynamically coupled, and both are controlled using time-sensitive spiking neural networks (SNNs), which are able to fine-tune their timing in order to exploit dynamical coupling and resonance - thereby arriving at wavelike motion like this.

Publications

Rieffel, J., Valero-Cuevas, F. and Lipson, H. (to appear) ``Automated Discovery and Optimization of Large Irregular Tensegrity Structures''. Computers and Structures Journal.

Saunders, F., Rieffel, J. and Rife, J. (2009) ``A Method of Accelerating Convergence for Genetic Algorithms Evolving Morphological and Control Parameters for a Biomimetic Robot'', International Conference on Autonomous Robots and Agents. (to appear)

Rieffel, J., Trimmer, B. and Lipson, H. (2008) ``Mechanism as mind: what tensegrities and caterpillars can teach us about soft robotics.'' Artificial Life XI: Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems.

Rieffel, J., Valero-Cuevas, F. and Lipson, H. (2007) ``Growing form-filling tensegrity structures using map L-systems''. Proceedings of the 2007 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

Rieffel, J., Stuk, R. and Lipson, H. (2007) ``Locomotion of a Tensegrity Robot Via Dynamically Coupled Modules''. Proceedings of the 2007 International Conference on Morphological Computation.

Rieffel, J. and Pollack, J. (2006) ``An Endosymbiotic Model for Modular Acquisition in Stochastic Developmental Systems''. Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALIFE X).

Rieffel, J. and Pollack, J. (2005) ``Crossing the Fabrication Gap: Evolving Assembly Plans to Build 3-D Objects''. 2005 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation.

Rieffel, J. and Pollack, J. (2005) ``Automated Assembly as Situated Development: Using Artificial Ontogenies to Evolve Buildable 3-D Objects''. Proceedings of the 2005 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

Rieffel, J. and Pollack, J. (2005). ``Evolutionary Fabrication: The Emergence of Novel Assembly Methods in Artificial Ontogenies". SEEDS workshop, at the 2005 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

Rieffel, J. and Pollack, J. (2005) ``Evolving Assembly Plans for Fully Automated Design and Assembly.'' Proceedings of the 2005 NASA/DoD Conference on Evolvable Hardware.

Rieffel, J. and Pollack, J. (2004) ``Artificial Ontogenies for Real World Design and Assembly.'' Ninth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems (ALIFE9) Workshop: Self-Organization and Development in Artificial and Natural Systems (SODANS) 2004.

Rieffel, J. and Pollack, J. (2004) ``The Emergence of Ontogenic Scaffolding in a Stochastic Development Environment''. Proceedings of the 2004 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference.

Rieffel, J., DiLeo, C., and Maxwell, B.A. (1999) ``Evolving Optimal Histogram Parameters for Object Recognition'', Proceedings, SPIE Intelligent Robots and Computer Vision XVIII.

My CV (pdf)