Michael Rubenstein

News
7/2026 - Our work on a low-visibility drones was presented at RSS 2026, and was featured in The Times, Reuters, IEEE Spectrum, New Scientist, Boing Boing, PetaPixel, IFLScience, and The Independent.

7/2026 - Mike Rubenstein was selected as a 2026 NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Fellow to develop a concept for using swarms of miniature satellites to explore Saturn's rings, atmosphere, and magnetosphere.

3/2026 - Congrats to Jingxian Wang and the Kriegman Lab for publishing their work on Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

11/2024 - Congratulations to Drew Curtis for the publication of his paper Continuous Sculpting: Persistent Swarm Shape Formation Adaptable to Local Environmental Changes in IEEE Transactions on Robotics.

I am an associate professor with a joint appointment in the Computer Science and Mechanical Engineering departments at Northwestern University.

My research interest is to advance the control and design of multi-robot systems, enabling their use instead of traditional single robots and to solve problems for which traditional robots are not suitable. Using these multi-robot systems can offer more parallelism, adaptability, and fault tolerance when compared to a traditional single robot. I am also interested in investigating how new technologies will allow for more capable multi-robot systems, and how these technologies impact the design of multi-robot algorithms, especially as these systems begin to number in the hundreds, thousands, or even millions of robots.

I received my PhD from the University of Southern California in Computer Science. After my PhD, I was a postdoctoral researcher in the Self-Organizing Systems Research Group at Harvard University. I completed my undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering at Purdue University.