Dr. Jason O'Kane has received an NSF research award for his project entitled "Why is automating the design of robot controllers hard, and what can be done about it?" This project seeks to bring together new techniques for filtering and planning to improve reasoning and analysis steps employed during robot design. By understanding those parts of the design process that are typically conducted by hand and by asking which parts can be practically automated, the research has the potential to assist practitioners by scaling up the problems tackled, optimizing systems automatically, and ultimately freeing designers from low-level detail and elevating their use of time.