Research
My research journey began during my sophomore year at Virginia Tech, and since then, my research experiences have been broad, with topics ranging from flying snakes to haptic feedback. As a result, I have become agile in my ability to adapt to new disciplines. As I explored and took on a wide variety of research projects, I developed crucial skills for doctoral research, and although these projects explore various disciplines, they all contribute to the broader vision of contributing to collaborative human-robot systems and human-robot trust.
Graduate Research
Reputation to Improve Team Performance
In this project, we explore the use of robot reputation as a tool to improve the performance of the entire team when serving demand. In our approach, robots utilize reputation to modify their behavior and serve more events over time.
Multi-Robot Coverage and Resource Allocation
We take a coverage control approach to the spatial resource allocation problem, which is highly relevant to supply-and-demand applications. We use a coverage control policy to deploy a team of mobile robots tasked with supplying resources of varying quantities and types to areas of demand.
Collaborative Teleoperation
In this project, we explore collaborative navigation (co-navigation) of a ground robot, in which a human teleoperates a ground robot through an environment, while the robot provides navigational assistance to the human via haptic feedback.
Haptic Modules
During my first lab rotation in graduate school I worked with students in the BU Robotics Lab to develop five haptic modules (shown on the left), with different types of haptic feedback. Our goal is for these modules to be a tool to rapidly develop prototypes of tactile displays.
Undergraduate Research
Stanford University: Medical Robotics
In 2019 I was a research fellow at Stanford University, where I primarily worked on developing an MRI-compatible surgical teleoperation device. I also developed a mold for phantom tissue for experiments.
George Mason University: Haptic Feedback
In 2018, I developed a haptic skin-stretch device for prosthetic limbs at George Mason University In 2019, before I worked at Stanford, I also worked on quantifying task completion abilities for user studies.
Virginia Tech: Snake Biomechanics
I studied flying snake biomechanics from 2017 to 2020 at Virginia Tech I analyzed data and also had the opportunity to travel to Australia"s Daintree Rainforest to study a close relative of the flying snake.
Publications
Journal Publications
[Under Review] M. Coffey,A. Pierson, "Persistent Multi-Resource Coverage with Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Teams", Autonomous Robots.
S. Frishman,A. Kight,I. Pirozzi,M. C. Coffey.,B.L. Daniel,M.R. Cutkosky, "Enabling In-Bore MRI-Guided Biopsies with Force Feedback", IEEE Transactions on Haptics, 2020.
Conference Publications
[Submitted] M. Coffey,A. Chaudhry,A. Pierson, "Maximizing Reputation for Serving Time-Constrained Tasks with Distributed Heterogeneous Teams", 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
[Submitted] D. Zhang,M. Coffey,R. Tron, "Learning from Haptics: Tuning Control Barrier Functions in Haptic Teleoperation", 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA).
M. Coffey,A. Pierson, "Assessing Reputation to Improve Team Performance in Heterogeneous Multi-Robot Coverage", 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.
K. Vakil,M. Coffey,A. Pierson, "Partial Belief Space Planning for Scaling Stochastic Dynamic Games", 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2024.
M. Coffey,A. Pierson, "Covering Dynamic Demand with Multi-Resource Heterogeneous Teams", 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023.
M. Coffey*,D. Zhang*,R. Tron,A. Pierson, "Reactive and Safe Co-Navigation with Haptic Guidance", 2023 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2023.
M. Coffey,A. Pierson, "Heterogeneous Coverage and Multi-Resource Allocation in Supply-Constrained Teams", 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2023.
M. Coffey,A. Pierson, "Collaborative Teleoperation with Haptic Feedback for Collision-Free Navigation of Ground Robots", 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2022.
R.E.S. Cruz*,M. C. Coffey*,A.Y. Sawaya,R.P. Khurshid, "Modular Haptic Feedback for Rapid Prototyping of Tactile Displays", 2021 IEEE World Haptics Conference, WHC 2021, 2021.