My research is motivated by the question: how can we build useful and interesting computational models of interaction with the physical world? This question consists of three interwoven strands: how to build interactive multimodal simulations of the physical world, with realistic sounds, deformations, and haptic force feedback; how to build computational models from measurements of real world objects; and how to automate the measurement and modeling using robotics, and make these facilities easy use from anywhere on the Internet.

Other research interests include: the Platonic Beast symmetric legged robot; personal desktop robotics; the Least Constraint programming framework for high-degree-of-freedom systems; and a classification of generic kinematic singularities.