Miana Smith

Center for Bits and Atoms

I completed a PhD at the MIT Center for Bits and Atoms and am now a Research Affiliate at the CBA. Prior to this, I completed my master's at the CBA in the MAS program, and my bachelor's in Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

My research was on reconfigurable robotics for assembling large structures.

Now I'm building Apidae Forms, an automated system for programmable and sustainable concrete construction via robotically assembled formwork and rebar.

Publications @ CBA

Comparative evaluation of robotically assembled discrete lattice systems for sustainable construction, Miana Smith, Paul Richard, Alfonso Parra Rubio, Neil Gershenfeld. Automation in Construction, Volume 187, 2026, 106952, ISSN 0926-5805, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.autcon.2026.106952
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

Scalable Robotic Voxel Construction September 2026 (PhD Dissertation)
Recursive Robotic Assemblers June 2023 (Master's Thesis)

Portfolio

Personal Site

Contact

miana at mit dot edu
Apidae Forms