Papers
57
Total Citations
2,325
H-Index
22
About
Shingo Murata is a pioneering roboticist whose career has been largely defined by his groundbreaking work on self-reconfigurable modular robotic systems. He is perhaps best known as a key contributor to the development of M-TRAN (Modular Transformer), a landmark distributed robotic system composed of homogeneous modules capable of autonomously changing their physical configuration — a paper that has garnered over 568 citations and remains a cornerstone reference in the field. Murata's research systematically addressed the full engineering challenge of modular robotics, spanning hardware design, motion planning, and automatic locomotion generation, with multiple papers from 2002 to 2007 collectively accumulating hundreds of citations. His work elegantly bridged theoretical frameworks and experimental validation, demonstrating real-world crawling, walking, and reconfiguration behaviors. Beyond hardware systems, Murata expanded his research into machine learning, proposing novel neural network architectures capable of learning time-dependent stochastic structures from fluctuating time series — work with compelling applications in robot learning through tutoring. With a cumulative citation profile exceeding 1,500 references across his most influential publications, Murata's contributions have profoundly shaped modern understanding of adaptive, reconfigurable robotic architectures and distributed autonomous systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1M-TRAN: self-reconfigurable modular robotic system568 citations · 2002
- 2Automatic Locomotion Design and Experiments for a Modular Robotic System222 citations · 2005
- 3Self-reconfigurable robots214 citations · 2007
- 4Hardware design of modular robotic system136 citations · 2002
- 5
- 6Automatic locomotion pattern generation for modular robots80 citations · 2004
- 7
- 8Toward a scalable modular robotic system68 citations · 2007
- 9Distributed adaptive locomotion by a modular robotic system, M-TRAN II65 citations · 2005
- 10A motion planning method for a self-reconfigurable modular robot64 citations · 2002