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SurGE: Surrogate Gradient-guided Evolution for Co-design of Legged Robots with Parallel Elasticity
SurGE is a co-design framework that guides an evolutionary search with an gradient from a differentiable model and a design aware control policy to jointly optimize the spring hardware and the controller, reducing the design objective by 37.65% on hardware while converging about 6 times more consistently than standard evolutionary search.
Mobile Pedipulation for Object Sliding via Hierarchical Control on a Wheeled Bipedal Robot
We introduce a hierarchical control framework that enables wheeled bipedal robots to slide objects with their legs, combining robot-object motion planning, nonlinear model predictive control based on a a novel reduced-order model, and whole-body control. Hardware experiments demonstrate under-desk object retrieval and dynamic scooting.
Robotics and Automation Letter (RA-L) 2026 | Website | arXiv | Video |
This work introduces a kinodynamic model predictive control (MPC) framework that exploits unidirectional parallel springs (UPS) to improve the energy efficiency of dynamic legged robots. Preliminary hardware experiments show a 14.8% reduction in energy consumption.
Contact Sensing via Joint Torque Sensors and a Force/Torque Sensor for Legged Robots
We propose a generalized momentum-based observer framework for detecting and localizing contact with data from (a) a hip-mounted force-torque (FT) sensor and (b) distributed low-cost strain-gauge-based joint torque sensors.
CASE 2025
Representation-Free Model Predictive Control for Dynamic Motions in Quadrupeds
This article presents a representation-free model predictive control (RF-MPC) framework for controlling various dynamic motions of a quadrupedal robot in three-dimensional (3-D) space, where rotation matrix is directly used for rotational dynamics.
Best Paper Award Finalist from Technical Committee (TC) on Optimization for Robotics
Humanoid Self-Collision Avoidance Using Whole-Body Control with Control Barrier Functions
The paper combines control barrier functions (CBFs) with a whole-body controller (WBC) so the MIT Humanoid can guarantee collision-free, joint-limit-respecting motion in real time by enforcing constraints via CBF inequality constraints in the quadratic program (QP).
Hybrid Sampling/Optimization-based Planning for Agile Jumping Robots on Challenging Terrains
We propose a two-stage kinodynamic jumping motion planner: the sampling stage proposes candidate jump sequences guided by a reachability map, while a trajectory optimization stage generates dynamically feasible motions.
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