Dissertation Talk: RiskyBots: Enabling Autonomy in Tiny Robots through Hardware–Software–Mechanical Co-Design

Event details Date: Friday, August 7, 2026 Time: 12:00 PM to 12:00 PM Location: Berkeley Wireless Research Center Open Forum Type: Lecture / Workshop Audience: Faculty,Students About this event This dissertation presents RiskyBots, a full-stack approach that explores how hardware–software–mechanical co-design can deliver real autonomy on tiny, resource-constrained robots. Such platforms rely on perception, control, and learning workloads must run within severe size, weight, and power budgets that general-purpose processors and off-the-shelf flight stacks cannot meet. Central to this effort are software stacks and runtimes for embedded RISC-V heterogeneous SoCs, together with a unified platform for co-designing and evaluating robotic systems across the full spectrum of fidelity: simulated hardware in simulated environments, physical silicon and FPGAs exercised hardware-in-the-loop within those environments, and fully custom hardware deployed in the real world. By spanning simulation, to silicon, to flight in a single framework, RiskyBots turns co-design into a repeatable path toward efficient, autonomous tiny robots. Official event details: https://events.berkeley.edu/eecs/event/325027-dissertation-talk-riskybots-enabling-autonomy-in