Mike Rubenstein

Mike Rubenstein is an Assistant Professor with joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and Department of Mechanical Engineering at Northwestern University. He holds the Lisa Wissner-Slivka and Benjamin Slivka Professorship in Computer Science and is affiliated with the Center for Robotics and Biosystems.

His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California, an M.S. in Electrical Engineering from USC, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Purdue University. Prior to joining Northwestern, he completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University's Self-Organizing Systems Research Group.

Rubenstein's research focuses on advancing multi-robot systems to enable capabilities beyond traditional single robots, emphasizing parallelism, adaptability, and fault tolerance at scale (hundreds to millions of robots). His work spans swarm shape control, modular self-reconfigurable robotics, bio-inspired satellite constellations, and novel sensing for air vehicle swarms. Key themes include algorithmic control for large-scale systems and hardware innovations to overcome current limitations in swarm robotics.

His advising has produced notable student achievements, including Petras Swissler's Best Student Paper Award at DARS 2021 and Drew Curtis's NDSEG Fellowship. Research trends across his publications reveal a consistent emphasis on scalability, real-world applicability, and bridging hardware constraints with algorithmic innovation in swarm systems.

Rubenstein actively mentors graduate students and leads projects involving swarm robotics platforms like FireAnt and PCBot. His lab focuses on developing systems where simplicity in individual robots enables emergent complexity at the swarm level, with applications ranging from space exploration to medical imaging.