Miana Smith

Center for Bits and Atoms

I'm a PhD candidate at the MIT Centor for Bits and Atoms. Prior to this, I completed my bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

My research is on reconfigurable robotics for assembling large structures.

Publications

Hierarchical Discrete Lattice Assembly: An Approach for the Digital Fabrication of Scalable Macroscale Structures, Miana Smith, Paul Arthur Richard, Alexander Htet Kyaw, and Neil Gershenfeld. 2025. In ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF '25), November 20-21, 2025, Cambridge, MA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3745778.3766665
Speech to Reality: On-Demand Production using Natural Language, 3D Generative AI, and Discrete Robotic Assembly, Alexander Htet Kyaw, Miana Smith, Se Hwan Jeon, and Neil Gershenfeld. 2025. In ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication (SCF '25), November 20-21, 2025, Cambridge, MA, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 12 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3745778.3766670
Voxel Invention Kit: Reconfigurable Building Blocks for Prototyping Interactive Electronic Structures, Miana Smith, Jack Forman, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Sophia Wang, and Neil Gershenfeld. CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '25), April 26-May 01, 2025, Yokohama, Japan. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 15 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3706598.3713948
Data-driven Feedback Control of Lattice Structures with Localized Actuation and Sensing, Dominik Fischer, Loi Do, Miana Smith, and Jiri Zemanek.In 2024 IEEE 63rd Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), pp. 1140-1146 (2024).
Self-Reconfigurable Robots for Collaborative Discrete Lattice Assembly, Miana Smith, Amira Abdel-Rahman, and Neil Gershenfeld. 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) May 13-17, 2024. Yokohama, Japan, pp. 3624-3631, doi: 10.1109/ICRA57147.2024.10609866.
Voxelcopter: Modular Autonomous Aerial Systems Wang, Sophia, Miana Smith, and Neil Gershenfeld. Proceedings of the 8th ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication, pp. 1-2. 2023.
Self-Replicating Hierarchical Modular Robotic Swarms, Amira Abdel-Rahman, Christopher Cameron, Benjamin Jenett, Miana Smith, and Neil Gershenfeld, Nature Communications Engineering, 1 1-10 (2022).

Theses

Recursive Robotic Assemblers June 2023 (Master's Thesis)

Portfolio

Personal Site

Contact

miana at mit dot edu