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About

Kirk Y. W. Scheper is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of evolutionary robotics, autonomous micro air vehicles (MAVs), and bio-inspired control architectures. He is best known for pioneering the application of Behavior Trees within the evolutionary robotics framework, demonstrating for the first time how this structured control paradigm can be deployed on real robotic platforms — work that has garnered over 50 citations and become a foundational reference in the field. A central theme running through his research is the challenge of bridging the "reality gap" — the difficulty of transferring controllers evolved in simulation to physical robots. Scheper has investigated sensory abstraction as a principled mechanism to address this problem, showing that simplifying sensory-motor representations can significantly improve real-world transferability. Beyond ground-based and simulated systems, his research extends to agile aerial platforms, including tailless flapping-wing MAVs and optical-flow-based autonomous landing systems, pushing the boundaries of what computationally constrained, lightweight vehicles can achieve. His body of work reflects a consistent commitment to enabling robust autonomy in resource-limited robotic systems, making meaningful contributions to both the theoretical underpinnings and practical implementation of intelligent, self-governing machines.