Aaron Ames

Professor Aaron Ames is the Bren Professor of Mechanical and Civil Engineering at the California Institute of Technology, with joint appointments in Control and Dynamical Systems and Aerospace. He is the Booth-Kresa Leadership Chair and Director of the Center for Autonomous Systems and Technologies. His research focuses on robotics, nonlinear control, hybrid systems, and cyber-physical systems, with a strong emphasis on rigorous theoretical foundations paired with experimental validation on real robotic platforms. A central theme of Professor Ames’ work is human-inspired bipedal locomotion. His lab designs, builds, and tests novel bipedal robots and robotic prostheses, aiming to achieve stable, efficient, and human-like walking. He is widely known for foundational contributions to hybrid systems, Zeno behavior, and safety-critical control using control barrier functions, as well as their application to legged robots and assistive devices. By tightly integrating theory and practice, his research advances both the mathematical underpinnings of control and their translation to autonomous and wearable robotic systems.