About the Lab

The Scalable Autonomous Systems (SAS) Lab is an interdisciplinary lab focusing on fundamental research in robotics, cooperative and decentralized control and automation. The facility was established in September 2008 and is housed in Drexel University's Mechanical Engineering and Mechanics Department and is located in the basement of the Hess building on 34th St. and Lancaster Ave. The lab is under the direction of Prof. M. Ani Hsieh and laboratory members consist of students from all undergraduate and graduate levels with students coming from the Electrical and Computer Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Computer Science departments. Drexel Space Systems Lab

The SAS Lab also collaborates with and is home to the Drexel Space Systems Lab, under the direction of Prof. Jin Kang.

News & Announcements

  • New RSS 2011 Videos! 12 robots dynamically distributing across 3 sites. We developed an ensemble modeling and controller synthesis framework to enable ensembl design of agent-level control policies. L: No Ensemble Feedback. R: W/ Ensemble Feedback
  • Two mobile manipulators assembling a 3-D structure. We developed a planning algorithm that partitions the assembly task into N subcomponents that can be executed by individual robots with minimal communication with other robots.
  • Prof. Hsieh is organizing a special symposia on Stochasticity in Robotics and Biological Systems for IROS 2011 with Profs. Harry Asada (MIT) and Greg Chirikjian (JHU). Submission details is available here.
  • The SAS Lab is a proud participant of the Women in Aerospace Technology Program (WATP)! The program is sponsored by the American Helicopter Museum, the Girls Scouts of Eastern PA, Boeing, Sikorsky, and Bentley Motors. Thanks to Leila Aborharb, Danielle Jacobson, and Swati Maini for volunteering to be mentors!
  • Our paper "Distributed Filtering for Time-Delayed Deployment to Multiple Site" by Bill Mather, Chris Braun, and Ani Hsieh won Best Paper Award at DARS 2010!
  • SAS Lab has been awarded a grant by Mathworks. The project, "Integrating Computational Thinking in Tomorrow's Mechanical Engineering Education", will develop an introductory course sequence focused on teaching scientific computing techniques using Matlab with applications and examples drawn from the areas of Robotics and Automation.

  • Matlab USARSim Toolbox Beta Version 1.4 available here.
  • The SASLab multi-robot testbed.