Max Robotics — Global Service Robot Directory + US Certification

About

L. M. Miller is a roboticist whose research bridges autonomous information acquisition and human-robot interaction. Her primary contributions lie in developing algorithms for active search and exploration, where robots must intelligently plan trajectories to gather data in unknown environments. Her most influential work, "Ergodic Exploration of Distributed Information" (2015, 127 citations), introduces a novel trajectory synthesis technique that leverages the ergodicity of a planned path relative to an expected information density map. This approach allows mobile robots to close the loop during search tasks, even with nonlinear measurements and dynamics, making it a foundational method for autonomous exploration. Miller also advanced the field of information-gathering robotics with her work on optimal planning for parameter estimation (2013, 24 citations), which uses Fisher information to explicitly connect robot dynamics to data acquisition objectives. In parallel, she has made notable contributions to wearable robotics, particularly in admittance control for upper limb exoskeletons (2012, 22 citations). Her research on reducing energy exchange between human and machine, and on managing redundancy and joint limits in seven-degree-of-freedom exoskeletons (2011, 11 citations), has improved the transparency and usability of assistive devices. Miller’s work continues to influence both autonomous systems and rehabilitation robotics.