Alireza Ramezani
Associate Professor,
Electrical and Computer Engineering
Contact
- a.ramezani@northeastern.edu
- 514 ISEC
360 Huntington Ave
Boston, MA 02115
Office
- 617.373.4027
Research Focus
Design and development of robots with nontrivial morphologies; Analysis and closed-loop feedback design of nonlinear systems; Robot locomotion (legged & fluidic-based); Robotics-inspired biology
Education
- PhD, Mechanical Engineering (Adviser: J. Grizzle), University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 2014
- MS, Mechanical Engineering (Adviser, R. D’Andrea), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), 2010
- BSc, Mechanical Engineering, Iran University of Science and Technology, 2007
Honors & Awards
- 2024 ASME Rising Star Award
- 2024 NSF CAREER (FRR program)
- 2024 Northeastern College of Engineering Impact Award
- Two cover articles for Science (Robotics) Magazine
- One Science Article in the top 5% of all research outputs scored by Science Magazine Altmetric
- Winner of NASA top honer, ARTEMIS Award, with Northeastern Team in 2022 BIG IDEA Competitions
- Research highlights at Nature
- Winner of 2022 NASA’s Game Changing Program Award
- Winner of 2020 NASA’s Game Changing Program Award
- NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) Faculty Research Program Position in 2022
Professional Affiliations
- American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS)
- Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- American Society of Mechanical Engineers(ASME)
- Climbing and Walking Robots Association (CLAWAR)
Research Overview
Design and development of robots with nontrivial morphologies; Analysis and closed-loop feedback design of nonlinear systems; Robot locomotion (legged & fluidic-based); Robotics-inspired biology
SiliconSynapse Lab
At “SiliconSynapse Lab”, we design bio-inspired robots, i.e., we are inspired by biology. Our works reside at the intersection of control theory and robotics, the intersection of theory and experiment. That said, the names ‘’Silicon’’ and ‘’Synapse’’ carried by the lab’s name are the fundamental components of the sensory feedback chains in robots and biological systems.
Selected Research Projects
- Project-X2: FALCON: Be ahead of the curve: predict upcoming turbulence
- Caltech collaboration
- Design/Control of Mars Multi-modal Morphing (M4) Rover
- – co-Principal Investigator, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL)
- Designing Tumbling Snake-inspired Rovers for the Exploration of the Moon’s Shackleton Crater
- – Principal Investigator, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s (STMD) Program
- Design, Flight Control, and Autonomous Navigation of Bioinspired Morphing Micro Aerial Vehicles for Operation in Confined Spaces
- – Principal Investigator, NSF Foundational Research in Robotics (FRR)
- Teaching Aerial Robots to Perch Like a Bat via AI-guided Design and Control
- – co-Principal Investigator, NSF National Robotics Initiative
- SCOUT and DOGHOUSE
- – Principal Investigator and supervisor of NU team, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate’s Game Changing Development Program
Department Research Areas
Selected Publications
- Sihite, Eric, Kalantari, Arash, Nemovi, Reza, Ramezani, Alireza, Gharib, Morteza (2023). Multi-Modal Mobility Morphobot (M4) with appendage repurposing for locomotion plasticity enhancement. Nature Communications, 14(1). 10.1038/S41467-023-39018-Y
- E. Sihite, A. Ramezani, ”Enforcing nonholonomic constraints in Aerobat, a roosting flapping wing model,” Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Jeju Island, Republic of Korea, December 8-11, 2020.
- E. Sihite, P. Kelly, A. Ramezani, ”Computational Structure Design of a Bio-inspired Armwing Mechanism,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2020. Also accepted in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Las Vegas, NV, October 25-29, 2020
- P. Dangol, A. Ramezani, N. Jalili, ”Performance satisfaction in Midget, a thruster-assisted bipedal robot,” American Control Conference (ACC), Denver, CO, July 1-3, 2020.
- A. Ramezani, ”Towards flapping flight upside-down landing through differential manipulation of inertial dynamics,” Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), Paris, France, May 31 to June 4, 2020.
- P. Dangol, A. Ramezani, ”Performance and Robustness Satisfaction in a Thruster-assisted Legged Robot,” International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), Berlin, Germany, July 12-17, 2020.
- A. C. B. de Oliveira, A. Ramezani, ”Thruster-assisted Center Manifold Shaping in Bipedal Legged Locomotion,” International Conference on Advanced Intelligent Mechatronics (AIM), Boston, MA, July 6-10, 2020.
- A. Ramezani, S.U. Ahmed, J.E. Hoff, S.J. Chung, S. Hutchinson, Describing aerial locomotion of an Articulated MAV with Stable Periodic Orbits, Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems: The 6th Int’l. Conference on Biomimetic and Biohybrid Systems, Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 2017, 394-405
- S.U. Ahmed, A. Ramezani, S.J. Chung, S. Hutchinson, From Rousettus Aegyptiacus Landing to Robotic Landing: Regulation of CG-CP Distance Using a Nonlinear Closed-Loop Feedback, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2017, 3560-3567
- A. Ramezani, S.J. Chung, S. Hutchinson, A Biomimetic Robotic Platform to Study Flight Specializations of Bats, Science (Robotics-AAAS), 2(3), 2017
- J.E. Hoff, A. Ramezani, S.J. Chung, S. Hutchinson, Synergistic Design of a Bio-Inspired Micro Aerial Vehicle with Articulated Wings, Robotics Science and Systems Conference (RSS), 2016
- A. Ramezani, X. Shi, S.J. Chung, S. Hutchinson, Bat Bot (B2), a Biologically Inspired Flying Machine, Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2016, 3219-3226
- A. Ramezani, J. Hurst, K.A. Hamed, J.W. Grizzle, Performance Analysis and Feedback Control of Atrias, a 3D Bipedal Robot, ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems Measurement and Control, 136(2), 2014, 21012
- H.W. Park, A. Ramezani, J.W. Grizzle, A Finite State Machine for Accommodating Unexpected Large Ground Height Variations in Bipedal Robot Walking, IEEE Transactions on Robotics,29(2), 2013, 331-345
Feb 07, 2025
Spring 2025 PEAK Experiences Awardees for Undergrad Research
Several COE, COS, and Khoury students mentored by COE faculty are recipients of the Spring 2025 PEAK Experiences Awards from Northeastern’s Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.
Nov 15, 2024
Patent for Multi-Modal Robot With Legged and Aerial Capabilities
ECE Associate Professor Alireza Ramezani received a patent for “Morpho-functional robots with legged and aerial modes of locomotion.”
Nov 08, 2024
Ramezani Receives ASME Rising Star Award
ECE Associate Professor Alireza Ramezani receives an ASME Rising Star in Mechanical Engineering Award in recognition of his NSF CAREER Award for advancing robotic functionality for small spaces that is inspired by bat movement.
Oct 02, 2024
Bats’ Weird Wings Inspired This Drone
ECE Associate Professor Alireza Ramezani was featured in the Popular Science article “Bats’ Weird Wings Inspired This Drone.”
Sep 25, 2024
Fall 2024 PEAK Experiences Awardees for Undergrad Research
Several COE, COS, and Khoury students mentored by COE faculty are recipients of the Fall 2024 PEAK Experiences Awards from Northeastern’s Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships.
Sep 24, 2024
Designing a Bat-Inspired Robot for Confined Space Exploration
ECE Associate Professor Alireza Ramezani developed a bat-inspired robot called Aerobat that can navigate tight spaces, opening up new possibilities for exploration and inspection in confined environments. Ramezani published his research on “A morphology-centered view towards describing bats dynamically versatile wing conformations” in The International Journal of Robotics Research.
Jul 23, 2024
Ramezani’s Robotics Research Featured in National Geographic Cover Story
ECE Associate Professor Alireza Ramezani’s research on robots inspired by bats was featured in a National Geographic cover story, “Bats Have Disease-Defying Superpowers. What If We Could Copy Them?“
May 15, 2024
Video Friday: Loco-Manipulation
ECE Assistant Professor Alireza Ramezani’s Silicon Synapse Lab was featured in IEEE Spectrum’s “Video Friday: Loco-Manipulation,” their weekly selection of awesome robotics videos.
May 08, 2024
2024 URF Scholars Recipients
Several engineering students received 2024 URF Scholars Awards from Northeastern’s Office of Undergraduate Research and Fellowships. URF Scholars are students who are graduating this year and who have earned a PEAK Experiences Award, applied for a distinguished fellowship, or participated in graduate school advising.
Apr 05, 2024
Ramezani’s Student Selected as NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellow
Henry Noyes, an undergraduate mathematics and physics student who works in ECE Assistant Professor Alireza Ramezani’s Silicon Synapse Lab, was selected as a NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Fellow for his project on “Autonomous Navigation and Multi-Modal Path Planning in Lunar Craters Using a Modular Snake-like Robot.”