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Daniel Morton
PhD Student
Daniel Morton is a PhD student in Mechanical Engineering. His research focuses on efficient planning and modeling methods for robotic manipulation, with an emphasis on space and novel hardware platforms. Prior to Stanford, Daniel received his B.S. in Mechanical Engineering with an Aerospace minor from Cornell University. While there, he conducted research in the Organic Robotics Lab, working on smart structures for morphing soft-robotic wings. Daniel has also interned at Boeing and NASA, and was an early member of a robotics startup, Medra. Outside of the lab, Daniel can be typically found on the tennis court or golf course, or skiing in Tahoe.
Awards:
- NSF Graduate Research Fellowship, 2022
- NASA Space Technology Graduate Research Opportunities Fellowship, 2024
Publications
7 publications · full lab bibliography
2025
- M. Ganai, R. Sinha, C. Agia, D. Morton, L. Di Lillo, and M. Pavone, “Real-Time Out-of-Distribution Failure Prevention via Multi-Modal Reasoning,” Conf. on Robot Learning, 2025. (In Press)
- D. Morton, R. Antonova, B. Coltin, M. Pavone, and J. Bohg, “Deformable Cargo Transport in Microgravity with Astrobee,” Robotics: Science and Systems - Space Robotics Workshop, 2025.
- D. Morton and M. Pavone, “Safe, Task-Consistent Manipulation with Operational Space Control Barrier Functions,” IEEE/RSJ Int. Conf. on Intelligent Robots & Systems, pp. 187-194, 2025.
- A. Elhafsi, D. Morton, and M. Pavone, “Scan, Materialize, Simulate: A Generalizable Framework for Physically Grounded Robot Planning,” ArXiv 2505.14938, 2025. (Submitted)