Hadas Kress-Gazit is the Geoffrey S.M. Hedrick Sr. Professor at the Sibley School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at Cornell University. She received her Ph.D. in Electrical and Systems Engineering from the University of Pennsylvania in 2008 and has been at Cornell since 2009. Her research focuses on formal methods for robotics and automation and more specifically on synthesis for robotics – automatically creating verifiable robot controllers for complex high-level tasks. Her group explores different types of robotic systems including modular robots, soft robots and swarms, and synthesizes ideas from different communities such as robotics, formal methods, control, hybrid systems and computational linguistics. She is an IEEE fellow and has received multiple awards for her research, teaching, and advocacy for groups traditionally underrepresented in STEM.
Talk Title: High-level verifiable robotics – specifications, synthesis, and feedback
Abstract:
We are all working toward making robots do complex tasks, but what do we mean by “complex tasks”? How do we define them and how do we ensure that the robot can actually do them? What happens if the robot fails? How do we think about it when there is more than one robot (multi robot systems and swarms)? In this talk I will discuss formal specifications that we can use to capture “complex tasks”, verification and synthesis techniques that help ensure robots can do the task, and feedback mechanism enabled by formal methods that help us anticipate and reason about failures.
RPL Summer School 2026 