Tuesday, 27 January 2026 at Noon | 490 Cory Hall
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Kyle Johnson
Ph.D. Candidate, Co-Founder
Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering | University of Washington
AVELA - A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access
Host: Kristofer Pister
ABSTRACT
In this talk, Kyle Johnson will present battery-free autonomous microrobots that can fly in the wind or drive independently on the ground using microwatts of energy harvested from light or radio waves. These mobile sensing platforms are expected to have transformative impact in applications ranging from agricultural monitoring and infrastructure inspection to locating sensor sources in hazardous industrial or extraterrestrial environments.
This work challenges the conventional assumption that locomotion is beyond the reach of battery-free robots, demonstrates several approaches for achieving autonomous operation in realistic application scenarios, and opens a discussion on the practicality of large-scale mobile sensor deployments in remote environments. Kyle will discuss how miniaturizing robots to the near-gram scale can significantly reduce their energy requirements, which when combined with electromechanical and structural innovations can enable autonomous battery-free mobility.
He will also explain how origami techniques were leveraged to create shape-changing “leaf-out” robots that can fly in the wind to disperse sensors, and how intermittent motion was used to enable battery-free robots that roll on the ground. Finally, Kyle will present preliminary work toward miniaturized helicopters and jumping robots.
BIO
Kyle Johnson is a fifth year Ph.D. Candidate in Computer Science & Engineering at the University of Washington (UW) and the Co-founder and Executive Director of the outreach nonprofit AVELA - A Vision for Engineering Literacy & Access. He works with Professors Vikram Iyer and Sawyer Fuller to explore how combinations of low-power actuation and control mechanisms can be used to create autonomous microrobots optimized for resource constrained applications. These include technologies for battery-free onboard actuation, wireless communication, remote sensing, and control. Kyle is also passionate about helping decrease opportunity gaps in the education system for underrepresented minority youth. He supported 150 different AVELA instructors in teaching to more than 2,100 K-14 students across the U.S. during the 2023-2024 academic year. Findings from this wide-scale outreach are viewable in the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF) and Black Issues in Computing Education (BICE) Conferences. Kyle’s work has been recognized by the Quad Fellowship, NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program, Amazon Science Hub Fellowship, Washington NASA Space Grant Consortium, and the National GEM Consortium. His publications have appeared in Science Robotics and the ACM MobiCom Conference and have garnered widespread media attention including by the NSF, GeekWire, Popular Science, and IEEE.
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