Leonard Lab

Princeton University

How do many individuals coordinate without a single leader? Naomi Ehrich Leonard’s lab studies the dynamics, control, and learning behind networked systems, from robot teams to collective animal behavior. Projects include decentralized robot task allocation, nonlinear models of opinion formation, and learning three-dimensional rotational dynamics from images. The work combines mathematical models, feedback control, and computational experiments to explain how local interactions produce group-level behavior. Its selected papers offer two entry points: predicting rigid-body motion with physics-based learning, and tuning how a network reaches agreement or maintains disagreement.