CV
Research Interests
- Smart materials and programmable matter
- Vision-based control
- Manifold estimators for rigid body motion
- Medical robotics
Publications
Journal Articles
- J. P. Swensen and A. M. Dollar. The connectedness of packed circles and spheres with application to conductive cellular materials. PLoS ONE 7(12):e51695, 12 2012, Download link.
Conference Articles and Posters
- J. P. Swensen and A. M. Dollar. Towards hyper-redundant and super-configurable articulated structures. Proc. ASME Conf. on Smart Materials, Adaptive Structures, and Intelligent System, 2012.
- J. P. Swensen and N. J. Cowan. An almost global estimator on SO(3) with measurement on S2. Proc. of AACC American Control Conference (ACC), 2012, pp. 1780-1786, 2012.
- J. P. Swensen and N. J. Cowan. Torsional dynamics compensation enhances robotic control of tip-steerable needles. Proc. of IEEE Internation Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2012, pp. 1601-1606, 2012.
- V. Kallem, M. Dewan, J. P. Swensen, G. D. Hager, and N. J. Cowan. Kernel-based visual servoing. Proc. IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. Intell. Robots Syst., pp. 1975-1980, Oct. 2007.
- D. Acton, T. Towell, J. Schwenker, J. Swensen, D. Shields, E. Sabatke, L. Klingemann, A. Contos, B. Bauer, K. Hansen, et al. Demonstration of the james webb space telescope commissioning on the JWST testbed telescope. Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE) Conference Series, vol. 6265, p. 21, 2006.
- M. Torrie, D. Cripps, and J. Swensen. Joint architecture for unmanned ground vehicles (JAUGS) applied to autonomous agricultural vehicles. Proc: Automation technology for off-road equipment, pp. 1-12, 2002.
Posters and Abstracts
- J. P. Swensen and N. J. Cowan. Modeling, estimation, and control of tip-steerable needles with torsional dynamics, Sept 2011. Presented at the Needle Steering Demo Session of 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems.
- J. P. Swensen, R. J. Webster III, and N. J. Cowan. Active cannulas: Applications to needle steering, Sept 2008. Presented at the Needle Steering Workshop at 2008 Medical Image Computing and Computer Assisted Intervention Society conference.
- J. P. Swensen, R. J. Webster III, and N. J. Cowan. Image guidance of active cannulas, Jan 2009. Presented at the IEEE-RAS/IFRR Winter School of Robotics Science on Medical Robotics and Computer-Integrated Interventional Systems.
About Me
I am now a Postdoctoral Associate in the GRAB Lab at Yale University. At Johns Hopkins, I worked on both vision-based control systems and robotic medical intervention systems. In particular, I am helping investigate methods of broad-image integrative methods of vision based control. I also worked on a steerable needles.
I graduated from Utah State University with a bachelors degree in May 2003. During my undergraduate, I worked at Autonomous Solutions, Inc. on a variety of unmanned vehicles, specifically autonomous agricultural vehicles. After graduation, I worked at Ball Aerospace and Technologies Corporation as an embedded software engineer. While there I contributed to the James Web Space Telescope developing control software for the scale model testbed telescope. This cleanroom scale model was created to facilitate design and development of wavefront sensing and control algorithms for initial deployment of the telescope. I also worked on a variety of focal plane simulators for Ball's line of star trackers.
I received my Masters of Science in Engineering from the Mechanical Engineering Department at Johns Hopkins University in 2009 and completed my PhD in December 2011. I have taken courses in robotics, computer vision, mathematical analysis, and locomotion.
Other Interests
I actively participate in the Boy Scouting program and have served as an Scoutmaster for a local troop.
With a friend in Colorado (it was his idea and script), I also made a feature-length educational video entitled Physics and the Pinewood Derby. There are several videos out there that simply give tricks about how to build a fast car. Ours does that also, but we aim for it first to get kids interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM), and second to help them build a good car. Check the trailer out on the [http://www.pinewoodphysics.com Physics and the Pinewood Derby website].
I also recently completed my second iTouch/iPhone/iPad game called Escape from Stonehenge. Escape from Stonehenge is a stonehenge themed maze game. It randomly creates mazes and the two modes of gameplay are to either (1) finish one maze as quickly as possible or (2) when a maze is completed a new maze appears and time is added.
My first iTouch/iPhone/iPad game was called FoundIt. FoundIt is a hidden objects game where lots of cartoony pictures are jumbled together and you have to find them as quickly as possible. There are 8 puzzles with 10 sets of 20 objects in each puzzle, so you can play for a long, long time. Check them out on my swenGames.com website, or in the iTunes AppStore and on YouTube:
FoundIt in the AppStore
FoundIt Lite in the AppStore
FoundIt on Youtube
Escape from Stonehenge in the AppStore
Escape from Stonehenge on Youtube
