IPAB Workshop - 08/03/2018

Title

Reaching the Unreachable: The Science of Robot Locomotion  

Abstract

Decades of research has been focused on robot locomotion. The  goal of this field is to develop walking, running, leaping and climbing robots which can operate on a variety of terrains. Driving this push towards locomotion is the demand for robots to carry out tasks like delivery and distribution in the real world. Yet, robot locomotion comparable with human level performance has not been seen outside the lab. This talk will briefly review the motivation of robot locomotion and its state of the art, followed by the main research challenges in planning and control. We will also show our current ongoing research progresses with some open questions, and discuss the technologies being developed in other fields that can promisingly transform these challenges into solvable problems. Finally an outlook will be given to useful robotic applications in the near and distant future.