Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

Austin Buchan is a roboticist whose work bridges bio-inspired design, state estimation, and low-cost multi-robot systems. His most impactful contribution is the design and architecture of the Unified Modular Snake Robot (257 citations), a hyper-redundant serial-linkage platform that carefully balances size, weight, power, and speed tradeoffs to enable versatile locomotion. To make such complex robots controllable, Buchan introduced the concept of a "Virtual Chassis" for snake robots, providing an intuitive way to represent and command their continuous body motion. He has also made significant advances in state estimation, fusing proprioceptive sensors with Extended Kalman Filters to accurately track a snake robot's shape and orientation during locomotion. Beyond serpentine robots, Buchan has contributed to legged locomotion by developing data-driven techniques for automatically identifying dynamic models of running robots, and to swarm robotics through cooperative localization strategies for heterogeneous teams of low-cost mobile robots—including micro autonomous underwater vehicles. His work on printable, modular sensing skins and rapid PCB fabrication tools (JITPCB) further demonstrates a commitment to making robotic hardware more accessible and robust.