Aaron Johnson

Aaron Johnson researches how to design intelligent interactions between a robot and its environment with a focus on taking robots out of the lab and factory and into the real world. His interests include novel robot design, behavior design, controller design, platform design, as well as dynamic transitions, contact, physics-based planning, bio-inspired robotics, robot vision, actuator modeling, and robot ethics. He has tested his robots in the Mojave desert, power plants, a coal mine, and on various military bases.

Johnson received his B.S. in electrical and computer engineering from Carnegie Mellon (2008). He received his Ph.D. in electrical and systems engineering at the University of Pennsylvania (2014), and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Personal Robotics Lab, the Robotics Institute, at CMU. He was formerly a visiting researcher with Boston Dynamics, an electrical engineering Intern at iRobot, and a research assistant with the Biorobotics Lab (Snake Robot Lab) at CMU.

Johnson’s work has been featured in many news stories, including interviews with the Associated Press and the Wall Street Journal, and in articles on technology news sites, including IEEE Spectrum, Gizmodo, Wired, and Engadget. He is a Fellow of ASME, received an NSF CAREER Award in 2020, and a Young Investigator Award from the Army Research Office in 2019. He was a Best Student Paper Finalist at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation in 2013, and at the Climbing and Walking Robots Conference in 2012. He received the David Thuma Laboratory Project Award in 2008 from CMU and an honorable mention for the Computing Research Association’s Outstanding Undergraduate Award in 2008.