iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Zac Manchester @zacmanchester.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Super excited to be starting the spring semester in a new job as an associate professor of AeroAstro at MIT @mitaeroastro.bsky.social. I'm teaching Spacecraft Attitude Determination and Control, which I'll be posting online if anyone wants to follow along: github.com/zacmancheste...

github.com

GitHub - zacmanchester/spacecraft-attitude-course: Spacecraft attitude determination and control

Spacecraft attitude determination and control. Contribute to zacmanchester/spacecraft-attitude-course development by creating an account on GitHub.

011

Reposted by Zac Manchester

mitrexlab.bsky.social @mitrexlab.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Recent PhD grad Mitch Fogelson presenting results from our ZeroG flight testing complex spinning deployable structures and validating our Dojo simulator

001

Reposted by Zac Manchester

mitrexlab.bsky.social @mitrexlab.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

PhD student Fausto Vega presenting his work on collision avoidance maneuver planning for spacecraft at the ISpaRo conference in Sendai. This work is super nice because we found a convex optimization formulation of the problem that comes with safety, performance, and convergence guarantees.

001

Zac Manchester @zacmanchester.bsky.social · 14/12/2025

Talking about our lab's recent smallsat missions at the AI4SPACE workshop at ISpaRo in Sendai, Japan

011

Reposted by Zac Manchester

IEEE Transactions on Robotics (T-RO) @ieeetro.bsky.social · 13/05/2025

This T-RO paper will be presented at #ICRA2025 develops a Contact-Implicit MPC method for controlling #robots making/breaking contact. The bilevel planner uses LCPs to reason about contact timing/forces online, generating new contact modes in real-time. ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/103...

Biped walking from left to right across (top) flat, (middle) sinusoidal, and (bottom) piecewise linear terrain using the same policy.

032

Zac Manchester @zacmanchester.bsky.social · 19/04/2025

Did a fun lecture this week on data-drive control with hints of behavior cloning and diffusion policies, but all grounded in classical linear systems theory. Most of the ideas are drawn from the behavioral control theory literature: youtu.be/fnajY4Ip13w?...

youtu.be

Optimal Control (CMU 16-745) 2024 Lecture 24: Data-Driven Control and Behavior Cloning

YouTube video by CMU Robotic Exploration Lab

191

Zac Manchester @zacmanchester.bsky.social · 23/01/2025

Just made first contact with our satellite PROMETHEUS-1 in collaboration with @cmurexlab.bsky.social @istecnico.bsky.social @uminho.bsky.social @cmurobotics.bsky.social @scsatcmu.bsky.social See where our satellite is here: tinygs.com/satellite/PR...

0225

Zac Manchester @zacmanchester.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

Cool work by my student @fogmb.bsky.social trying to scale joint robot design and control optimization to realistic problems. These are super challenging optimization problems that are often handled separately by expert designers. We're trying to automate it.

070

Reposted by Zac Manchester

Mitch Fogelson @fogmb.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

🚀 Co-Optimizing Robots for Performance 🚀 🌟 CAPO: A scalable optimization method: ✅ Jointly optimizes actuators & control traj. ✅ Scales to complex systems ✅ Finds robust, efficient designs 🏋️ Tested on: 🚁 Multirotors 🛰️ Space structures 🧥 Cloth 🐟 Soft robots 📄 rexlab.ri.cmu.edu/papers/CAPO_...

073

Reposted by Zac Manchester

mitrexlab.bsky.social @mitrexlab.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

End of an era as Kevin Tracy defends his PhD. Kevin has been with the lab since the very beginning at Stanford, through the move to CMU. He's done amazing optimization-based control work with applications spanning aerospace and robotics and it has been an absolute pleasure working with him.

1114