I am a member of the technical staff at the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. I completed my Ph.D. in the computer science department of the University of Colorado at Boulder in August 2006, where I was also (occasionally) an instructor. My research interests are primarily in robotics, distributed computing, signal processing, spacecraft software systems, and operating systems. For information about my current work, please contact the laboratory.
For my thesis, I worked with John Bennett on a project to develop scalable systems of distributed robots, primarily for remote sensing applications. I have also worked with Rick Han and his sensor networks group on the MANTIS project, mostly on operating system aspects.Several times during my career at CU, I taught an engineering design course (GEEN 1400) based on lego robots. If you ever have the chance to teach lego robots, I highly recommend it. I have also taught courses in data structures and embedded sensor networks, and I was a TA for the software engineering course.
I once was a spacecraft software engineer at Ball Aerospace, where I worked on guidance software for Deep Impact.
During graduate school, I founded IguanaWorks Incorporated with Joe Dunn. Since I left to join the Lincoln Laboratory, my position at IguanaWorks has been filled by Ben Luey.
In my spare time, I enjoy cooking and playing basketball.
Available upon request.
Brian Shucker, Todd Murphey, and John K. Bennett. "Convergence Preserving Switching for Topology Dependent Decentralized Systems." IEEE Transactions on Robotics. (To appear)
Brian Shucker, Todd Murphey and John K. Bennett. "Switching Rules for Decentralized Control with Simple Control Laws" American Control Conference (ACC). New York, New York. July 2007. (pdf)
Brian Shucker. Control of Distributed Robotic Macrosensors. Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Colorado at Boulder. August 2006. (pdf) (oral defense presentation)
Brian Shucker, Todd Murphey and John K. Bennett. "An Approach to Switching Control Beyond Nearest Neighbor Rules" American Control Conference (ACC). Minneapolis, Minnesota. June 2006. (pdf) (powerpoint presentation)
Brian Shucker, Todd Murphey and John K. Bennett. "A Method of Cooperative Control Using Occasional Non-Local Interactions" IEEE Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Orlando, Florida. May 2006. (pdf) (powerpoint presentation)
Gary Yee, Brian Shucker, Joe Dunn, Anmol Sheth, and Richard Han. "Just-In-Time Sensor Networks." The Third IEEE Workshop on Embedded Networked Sensors (EmNets 2006). Boston, Massachusetts. May 2006.
Brian Shucker and John K. Bennett. "Target Tracking with Distributed Robotic Macrosensors." In Proceedings of MILCOM 2005. Atlantic City, New Jersey. October, 2005. (pdf) (powerpoint presentation)
Brian Shucker, Jeff Rose, Anmol Sheth, James Carlson, Shah Bhatti, Hui Dai, Jing Deng, and Rick Han. "Embedded Operating Systems for Wireless Sensor Nodes" (chapter), Handbook of Sensor Networks: Algorithms and Architectures. Wiley, 2005.
Shah Bhatti, James Carlson, Hui Dai, Jing Deng, Jeff Rose, Anmol Sheth, Brian Shucker, Charles Gruenwald, Adam Torgerson, and Rick Han. "MANTIS OS: An Embedded Multithreaded Operating System for Wireless Micro Sensor Platforms." ACM/Kluwer Mobile Networks & Applications (MONET), Special Issue on Wireless Sensor Networks. 2005. Guest co-editors R. Ramanathan, R. Govindan and K. Sivalingam.
Brian Shucker and John K. Bennett. "Scalable Control of Distributed Robotic Macrosensors." In Proceedings of 7th International Symposium on Distributed Autonomous Robotic Systems (DARS '04). (pdf) (powerpoint presentation)
Hector Abrach, Shah Bhatti, James Carlson, Hui Dai, Jeff Rose, Anmol Sheth, Brian Shucker, Jing Deng, and Richard Han. "MANTIS: System Support for Multimodal Networks of In-situ Sensors." In Proceedings of Second ACM International Workshop on Wireless Sensor Networks and Applications (WSNA '03). (pdf) (powerpoint presentation)
Anmol Sheth, Brian Shucker, and Richard Han, "VLM2: A Very Lightweight Mobile Multicast System for Wireless Sensor Networks." In Proceedings of IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference (WCNC) 2003. (pdf) (powerpoint presentation)
Brian Shucker. "A Ground-Based Prototype of a CMOS Navigational Star Camera for Small Satellite Applications." In Proceedings of the 15th AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites. Utah State University, August 2001. First place winner in 9th Annual Frank J. Redd Student Scholarship Competition. (zipped pdf)
Barry Goeree and Brian Shucker. "Geometric Attitude Control of a Small Satellite for Ground Tracking Maneuvers." In Proceedings of the 13th AIAA/USU Conference on Small Satellites. Utah State University, August 1999. First place winner in 7th Annual Frank J. Redd Student Scholarship Competition. (pdf) (powerpoint presentation) (animation)
The following papers were either unpublished, published as technotes, or appeared in publications that are hard to get, so I've posted them here to make them more accessible. Versions of these files in other formats are available upon request.
Brian Shucker and John K. Bennett. "Virtual Spring Mesh Algorithms for Control of Distributed Robotic Macrosensors." University of Colorado Department of Computer Science, technical report CU-CS-996-05. May 2005. (pdf)
Hector Abrach, Jim Carlson, Hui Dai, Jeff Rose, Anmol Sheth, Brian Shucker and Richard Han. "MANTIS: System Support For MultimodAl NeTworks of In-situ Sensors." University of Colorado Department of Computer Science, technical report CU-CS-950-03. April 2003. (pdf)
Anmol Sheth, Brian Shucker, and Richard Han. "VLM2: A Very Lightweight Mobile Multicast System for Wireless Sensor Networks." University of Colorado Department of Computer Science, technical report CU-CS-938-02. August 2002. (pdf)
Brian Shucker, Joseph Dunn, and Richard Browne. "Design and Implementation of JaDiSM" (Java Distributed Shared Memory). December 2001. (doc) (powerpoint presentation) (source code available upon request)
Brian Shucker. "A Ground-Based Prototype of a CMOS Navigational Star Camera for Small Satellite Applications" (Honors Thesis). University of Arizona, April 2001. (zipped pdf)
Brian Shucker. "Rotating the Penrose Staircase." December 2000. (pdf)
Marissa Herron, Barry Goeree, and Brian Shucker. "Detumbling of the UASat." University of Arizona Student Satellite Project, technical note GNC-016. April 2000. (pdf)
Barry B. Goeree and Brian Shucker. "Kinematics of Ground Station Tracking." University of Arizona Student Satellite Project, technical note GNC-012. May, 1999. (pdf)
These programs don't have anything to do with my research or coursework, but they are interesting to look at.
text2pic: this program formats and colors text to make it look like a picture. Joe built a web interface for text2pic, so you can go to our text pictures site and look at some samples or make your own.
Duplicator Maker: this one takes an arbitrary C program as input and creates a new C program as output. When executed, the new program makes a copy of itself and then executes as if it were the original program. Programs like this are of theoretical interest, especially because they have implications for computer system security (Ken Thompson's "Reflections on Trusting Trust" makes some interesting points on the topic). I use the Duplicator Maker as a component in my Self-Replicating Graphics Maker.
Self-Replicating Graphics Maker: this was
certianly the most difficult 250 lines of C code I ever wrote, and
it's also the most non-deliberately confusing code I've ever seen.
You have to look at it carefully to see why. It takes a picture as
input and produces a picture as output. The output picture is
actually a text picture, and the text is the complete C-code
instructions for creating the output picture. That means that if you
type in the text of the picture, compile it, and execute the resulting
program, it will create itself.
Using this program, I produced this
self-replicating image, which won the grand prize in the Colorado
Art in Science, Science in Art
competition. A full-size print is now part of a travelling art
exhibit, which opened at the Denver Museum
of and Nature and Science.
