• Kostas Bekris

Congratulations to Prof. Kostas Bekris, whose proposal titled “Robust Planning for Dynamic Tensegrity Structures” to the NASA Early Career Faculty program has been funded. The grant provides $600K support over a period of 3 years starting this October. Tensegrity is an exciting concept pursued by NASA as a potential planetary exploration platform. The link below shows a video showing the robot developed at NASA Ames from their collaborator, Dr. Vytas SunSpiral, based on tensegrity principles:Prof. Bekris’ project will develop path planning algorithms for such platforms, which reason about the underlying dynamics and contacts with planetary surfaces. This is a direction that he has already been pursuing with his Ph.D. student, Zakary Littlefield, who is a NASA fellow and is interning at NASA Ames.