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About

Jonathan D. Hiller is a pioneering researcher in the fields of soft robotics, evolutionary robotics, and automated design. His most significant contribution is the development of methods for the automatic design and manufacture of soft robots, as demonstrated in his highly cited 2011 paper (313 citations), which introduced the concept of creating functional robots purely through the unconstrained 3D distribution of materials. Hiller also advanced modular robotics with his work on vacuum-based bonding mechanisms for modular systems, enabling the formation of reconfigurable structures. His research on evolving amorphous robots (28 citations) broke new ground by moving beyond traditional rigid-link designs to explore continuous, soft morphologies that can be optimized through evolutionary algorithms. Additionally, he has contributed to neuroevolution for controlling multilegged robots and stochastic modular robot assembly planning. Hiller’s work has been instrumental in shifting the paradigm from rigid, discrete components to soft, continuous, and automatically designed robotic systems, with his papers collectively garnering hundreds of citations and influencing the next generation of adaptive, manufacturable robots.