"Sensing What Matters: Embodied Control for Agile Autonomous Systems"

Please join the ME department for our Distinguished Speaker Seminar on February 24th

Dr. Sean Humbert is the Denver Business Challenge Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and the founding Director of the Robotics Graduate Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. He holds a BS degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California Davis along with MS and PhD degrees in Mechanical Engineering from Caltech. Prof. Humbert has served as a member of the Board for Army Science and Technology (BAST), as a core member of the Board on Army RDT&E, Systems Acquisition and Logistics (BARSL), as a member of the DARPA MTO Microsystems Exploratory Council (MEC), and is an AIAA Associate Fellow. He is the recipient of the AIAA National Capital Section Hal Andrews Young Scientist/Engineer Award and an ARO Young Investigator Award.

Distributed mechanosensing embedded in the airframe provides low-latency access to dynamically significant quantities without numerical differentiation or heavy filtering. Paired with Incremental Nonlinear Dynamic Inversion (INDI)—a sensor-centric framework operating on measured increments of acceleration—this approach reduces dependence on high-fidelity modeling and remains robust under damage or rapid reconfiguration. By grounding control in direct physical observability rather than complex modeling, we move closer to the principles underlying biological agility in uncertain environments.