Joseph Moore joined the Johns Hopkins faculty in fall of 2024 as an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering. Previously he was a senior staff researcher at the Applied Physics Laboratory.
What are your main areas of research? Is there a specific problem you are trying to solve?
My research is focused on designing control algorithms that can enable robust and highly agile robots. In particular, I am interested in developing methods at the intersection of algorithmic control, computational physics, and machine learning that can push robotic systems to their physical limits while also providing meaningful guarantees on system performance, like safety or task completion.
As robotic systems begin to execute more complex maneuvers and move farther from their conventional performance envelopes, it becomes more challenging to assure performance. A key research question that I hope to answer is how to compute guarantees on system performance for these highly agile robotic systems, especially when the underlying algorithms require planning and learning online.
What are some of your goals at JHU?
I am excited to conduct research on aerial robots and control systems that can achieve similar levels of flight performance by reasoning about the surrounding fluid flow and the tight coupling between perception and action. I am also excited about the opportunities to explore approaches for unified multi-robot coordination and motion-planning. Oftentimes we approach multi-robot coordination at a level that abstracts away the underlying dynamics. However, if we aim to develop safe, highly agile multi-robot teams, we must explore approaches that simultaneously reason about both the low-level physics and the desired high-level collaborative behavior.
I also plan to contribute to the thriving JHU robotics ecosystem through teaching, mentoring, and continued collaboration with the JHU Applied Physics Laboratory.
What inspired you to pursue mechanical engineering (or your specific field within it) as a discipline?
In my undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to take an introductory course titled “Signals and Systems,” where I suddenly realized that the dynamical systems I had been studying in my core mechanical engineering courses could be represented using systems theory. Even more exciting was the realization that this systems theory could be used to shape the behavior of the dynamical systems through feedback controller design. Around that time, I also had the opportunity to conduct undergraduate research in the RPI Center for Automation Technologies and Systems, where I was able to put my coursework into practice. It was not long after that I was completely hooked on controls and robotics.
Where did you grow up and where did you live before Baltimore?
I grew up in upstate New York and completed my undergraduate studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY. I then attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I completed my master’s and PhD in Mechanical Engineering in the Robot Locomotion Group. Following my PhD, I joined the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, MD, as a Postdoctoral Fellow and have lived in Maryland ever since.
Outside of teaching and mechanical engineering in general, what are your other interests? Any favorite films, music, books, etc.?
Outside of research and teaching, I enjoy spending time with my family, which often involves engaging in outdoor activities like hiking, fishing, and camping. I also enjoy reading and occasionally writing speculative fiction.