Avik De

I am currently Adjunct Faculty in the Electrical and Systems Engineering department at UPenn, and Chief Science Officer at Ghost Robotics. I also write about topics in robotics and computing for a broad audience on Substack.

Here are my CV and links:

While I welcome research collaborations, I am unfortunately not able to support students at the moment.

Research

Current projects:

Fundamental limits of electrically-actuated running robots

Past projects:

Compositional control of running and hopping robots
Design and control of flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles (FWMAV)
Task-based BLDC motor control for robotics
Active perception in legged robots
Active reorientation using legs and tails

Teaching

Fall 2026: UPenn ESE 3990 Reinforcement Learning: In Theory and In Practice – guest lecturer
UPenn guest lecturer. ESE 512 (graduate dynamical systems), MEAM 517 (Control and Optimization with Applications in Robotics), MEAM 520 (Intro to Robotics) 2017
UPenn/Coursera instructor. Robotics specialization instructor for Mobility, Capstone courses; developed curriculum including topics like how animals and robots are designed and how they move, linearized control and balancing a mobile inverted pendulum 2016
UPenn TA. TA for ESE 201 (undergraduate dynamical systems), ESE 512 (graduate dynamical systems) 2011–12

Invited Talks

2026/11 Dartmouth
2024/11 OSU CoRIS Seminar – Power-efficient autonomous mobile robots
2022/06 GRASP Industry Day – Introduction to Ghost Robotics
2022/05 ICRA impulsive workshop – Design and control of insect-scale bees and dog-scale quadrupeds
2022/05 Kodfest – Kodlab 2010-2017
2021/09 IROS actuator workshop – Operating at force, power, and thermal limits in electrically-actuated commercial legged robots
2021/06 ICRA legged robot workshop – Perception-aided control and planning with reduced order models
2021/05 ICRA teleoperation workshop – Shared autonomy and user interaction in commercial legged robots
2021/04 CMU RI Seminar – Design and control of insect-scale bees and dog-scale quadrupeds
2021/02 IFRR quadruped robotics colloquium – State of the art in quadrupedal robotics
2020/07 RSS contact workshop – Reacting to contact
2020/07 ICRA legged workshop – Designing power-efficient quadrupedal robots for commercial applications at Ghost Robotics
2019/09 GRASP 40 year celebration – Perspective on Academia vs. Industry
2019/07 ACC templates workshop – Optimal Control Synthesis via Compositions of Reduced-Order Models (Templates)
2019/05 ICRA legged workshop – Connecting Today’s Applications for Commercial Legged Robots to their Design and Control
2018/10 IROS templates workshop – Template Composition for Synthesis of New Behaviors from Simpler Constituents
2018/06 RSS 2018 tails workshop – Tail design and control for a tail- and hip-energized and -stabilized bipedal hopping robot
2018/05 ICRA actuator workshop – Platform design using dynamic motor, electronics, and transmission models
2018/05 ICRA 2018 multilegged robots workshop – Toward robust locomotion subject to variations in robot scale, mass, payload, and environmental conditions
2017/10 UC Berkeley biomechanics seminar – Modular hopping and running (for biologists and engineers)
2017/06 UMichigan, JHU seminar series – Stable hopping and running from compositions of dynamical primitives
2017/02 CMU bipedal seminar; UW seminar – Anchored Behaviors from Template Compositions
2017/02 TRI (Palo Alto, CA), Google (Mountain View) – Mechanically Simple, Behaviorally Versatile Quadrupeds
2017/01 Neuroscience meeting (Tulane) – Reactive coordination: stabilizing common quadrupedal gaits without CPGs
2015/10 Fall UPenn ESE PhD Colloquium – Sequential, Parallel and Symbolic Compositions
2015/06 AMAM 2015 (Cambridge, MA) – Anchor synthesis via template composition

More About Me

Bio:

Avik is currently an Adjunct Associate Professor in the UPenn ESE department, and the Chief Science Officer at Ghost Robotics. In these roles, his goal is to produce research in robotics and AI that advances our conceptual understanding but can also be of immediate utility in the real world. He has received a Ph.D. and postdoc in the areas of bio-inspired design and control, and applied these methods to platforms ranging from a 100mg RoboBee to a 50kg rugged quadrupedal Vision 60. He is currently researching how modelling and dynamical systems methods can be integrated with reinforcement learning and AI world models to develop safe, reliable, and efficient robotic systems.

Editorial and Peer-Review Service

Advisory Panel, Bioinspiration & Biomimetics (2026–now)
Reviewer. IJRR, Bioinspiration & Biomimetics, Automatica, T/RO, RA/L, European Journal of Physics, Control Engineering Practice, ICAR, ICHR, ICRA, IFACWC, IROS, SYROCO, WAFR, MCA, Autonomous Robots.

Outreach

Two-time volunteer / judge at Penn First Lego League (FLL) 2014–16
Animal welfare. Volunteer at Philadelphia Animal Welfare Society (PAWS); cat fostering 2014–now

Memberships

JH Math Club, JHU. Part of JHU Putnam team; contributed problems to JH math tournament for HS students 2006–09 ASME chapter, JHU. Secretary/treasurer 2006–10
Hopkins Baja, JHU. Team captain of an engineering design team creating a single-seat offroad vehicle for an SAE-organized collegiate competition; suspension and steering design lead 2006–10