Steven Man

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Hi, I am a Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute working with Prof. Aaron Johnson and Prof. Sarah Bergbreiter. My research interests lie in the intersection of design and control for novel robot locomotion. I’m fortunate to be supported by the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Priror to joining CMU, I received my B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I worked with Prof. Elliot Hawkes on everting soft robots for industrial inspection and shape-changing robotic collectives. I have also spent summers working at Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, CMU Robotics Institute Summer Scholars, and SpaceX.

news

Nov 12, 2025 The project I started as an undergraduate (during RISS) The microDelta: Downscaling robot mechanisms enables ultrafast and high-precision movement was published in Science Robotics !
Apr 01, 2025 I was awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP)!
Jan 27, 2025 My paper submission Zippy: The smallest power-autonomous bipedal robot was accepted to International Conference on Robotics and Automation 2025 !
Nov 20, 2024 My undergraduate work Large-Scale Vine Robots for Industrial Inspection: Developing a New Framework to Overcome Limitations With Existing Inspection Methods was published in Robotics and Automation Magazine !

selected publications

  1. l4dc_frontfig_v5_wbg_single.png
    How to Train Your Latent Control Barrier Function: Smooth Safety Filtering Under Hard-to-Model Constraints
    Kensuke Nakamura, Arun L. Bishop, Steven Man, Aaron M. Johnson, Zachary Manchester, and Andrea Bajcsy
    2025
  2. microDelta.png
    The microDelta: Downscaling robot mechanisms enables ultrafast and high-precision movement
    Steven Man*, Sukjun Kim*, and Sarah Bergbreiter
    Science Robotics, 2025
  3. zippy.gif
    Zippy: The Smallest Power-Autonomous Bipedal Robot
    Steven Man*, Soma Narita*, Josef Macera*, Naomi Oke, Aaron M. Johnson, and Sarah Bergbreiter
    In 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2025
  4. vine.png
    Large-Scale Vine Robots for Industrial Inspection: Developing a New Framework to Overcome Limitations With Existing Inspection Methods
    William E. Heap, Steven Man, Vedad Bassari, Steven Nguyen, Elvy B. Yao, Neel A. Tripathi, Nicholas D. Naclerio, and Elliot W. Hawkes
    IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine, 2024