Congratulations to Honor Student Madeleine Lavi’s Graduation!
Published:
Congratulate to honors student Madeleine Lavi on her gradulation and successfully completing her thesis, “Optimization on the Trajectory Planning for Cooperative Robotic Manipulators: A Case Study.”
In her work, Madeleine investigates how cooperative dual-manipulator systems can outperform a single robot manipulator by reducing run time and better managing task complexity.
Building on an existing fixed-manipulator setup for dispensing glue along the perimeter of a curved windshield, she integrated an additional Universal Robots UR5 and developed a method to split windshield waypoints so each robot covers half the surface area.
She evaluated a base case and an optimization-based scoring approach that accounts for manipulability and joint margin considerations. Results show that while certain scoring configurations achieved faster completion times than the base case, collision-avoidance mitigation appropriately dominated the decision-making—highlighting the practical tradeoffs required for safe, efficient cooperative manipulation.
Madeleine’s thesis advances scalable approaches to multi-robot coordination in manufacturing-style tasks where safety and throughput must be jointly optimized. We wish her continued success in her next steps.