Kevin M. Lynch
Associate Professor and Associate Chair
Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence
Mechanical Engineering Dept.
Northwestern University
2145 Sheridan Road
Evanston, IL 60208 USA

kmlynch [at] northwestern.edu
TEL: 847-467-5451
FAX: 847-491-3915
Office: B221 Tech


Research Interests: Robotics. Mechanics, planning, and control of robotic manipulation (juggling, throwing, pushing, rolling, vibration, etc.); self-organizing systems, particularly decentralized control of mobile sensor networks; motion planning and control for underactuated dynamic systems; physical human/robot interaction; industrial applications.

Principles of Robot Motion, by Howie Choset, Kevin Lynch, Seth Hutchinson, George Kantor, Wolfram Burgard, Lydia Kavraki, and Sebastian Thrun, MIT Press, 2005. Amazon listing. Covers bug algorithms, configuration space, potential function methods, roadmaps, cell decomposition approaches, sampling-based algorithms (PRM's, RRT's, etc.), Kalman filtering, Bayesian methods, robot dynamics, trajectory planning for dynamic systems, and nonholonomic and underactuated systems.

Co-director, Laboratory for Intelligent Mechanical Systems

  • Research and publications
  • Editor, IEEE Transactions on Robotics
  • Administrative Committee, Robotics and Automation Society
  • Faculty, Northwestern Institute on Complex Systems (NICO)
  • CV
  • Directions to my office
  • Undergraduate Mechatronic Design Projects
  • Undergraduate Mechatronics Design Lab
  • Mechatronics Wiki
  • Teaching:
      Spring 2008: ME 449, Robotic Manipulation
      Winter 2008: ME 333, Introduction to Mechatronics
      Spring 2006: ME 495, Special Topics: Motion Planning and Control Under Uncertainty
      Winter 2006: ME 333, Introduction to Mechatronics
      Spring 2005: ME 450, Geometry in Robotics
      Winter 2005: ME 333, Introduction to Mechatronics
      Winter 2005: ME 391, Fundamentals of Control Systems