Invited Speakers

Jonathan W. Hurst (Agility Robotics & Oregon State University, USA).

Title: TBA

Bio: Jonathan W. Hurst is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder of Agility Robotics, as well as an Associate Professor of Robotics and College of Engineering Dean’s Professor at Oregon State University. He holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in robotics, all from Carnegie Mellon University. His university research focuses on understanding the fundamental science and engineering best practices for legged locomotion. Agility Robotics is taking this research to commercial applications for robotic legged mobility, working towards a day when robots can go where people go, generate greater productivity across the economy, and improve quality of life for all.

Prof. Maurice Fallon (Oxford University, UK) .

Title: Navigation Systems for Industrial Inspection with Quadruped robots

Bio: Dr. Maurice Fallon is a Royal Society Research Fellow at the Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford. He holds a PhD in Information Engineering from University of Cambridge. From 2008-2012 he was a post-doc in the Marine Robotics Group working on robotics navigation. From 2012-2015 he was the perception lead of MIT’s team in the DARPA Robotics Challenge developing autonomy, state estimation and planning for the Boston Dynamics Atlas robot. His research is focused on probabilistic methods for localization and mapping and state estimation for legged robots and is also interested in dynamic motion planning and control.

Francesco Ferro (PAL Robotics, Spain).

Title: A Generation of Humanoid Service Robots

Bio: Francesco Ferro is the CEO and co-founder of PAL Robotics, one of the top service robotics companies in the world, and a euRobotics asibl Board Director. He received a BSc + MSc degree in Telecommunications Engineering at Politecnico di Torino in 2002 (Italy), a Master at ISEN (Lille, France) and an Executive MBA at the University of Barcelona (Spain) in 2011. Since 2004, he develops cutting-edge humanoid service robots at PAL Robotics.

Xingxing Wang (Unitree Robotics, China).

Title: Unitree Robotics: let more people enjoy quadruped robots

Bio: Xingxing Wang is the founder and CEO of Unitree Robotics, which is an excellent dynamic performance robot company. They are bringing low-cost and good performance robots to everyone’s lives. He will bring their newest quadrupedal robot Laikago for demonstration.

Prof. Marco Hutter (Robotic Systems Lab, ETH Zurich, Switzerland).

Title: Autonomy for ANYmal

Bio: Marco is an assistant professor for robotic systems at ETH Zurich and co-founder of ANYbotics AG, a Zurich-based company developing legged robots for industrial applications. Marco’s research interests are in the development of novel machines and actuation concepts together with the underlying control, planning, and learning algorithms for locomotion and manipulation. Marco is part of the National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) Robotics and NCCR Digital Fabrication and PI in various international projects (e.g. EU Thing) and challenges (e.g. DARPA SubT).

Dr. Nikos Tsagarakis (Humanoid and Human-Centered Mechatronics IIT, Italy).

Title: TBD

Bio: Nikos Tsagarakis is Tenured Senior Scientist and Principal Investigator of the Humanoid design & Human Centred Mechatronics (HHCM) Research Line, a leading research laboratory at IIT with strong expertise in robot design, modelling and control, and in the development of new mechatronics components (actuation and sensing). HHCM is the home laboratory where the compliant humanoids COMAN and WALK-MAN and the CENTAURO hybrid wheeled-legged quadrupedal manipulation platform were developed. Nikos Tsagarakis was the coordinator of EU project WALKMAN and has served as principal investigator for several EU projects in the past including VIACTORS, SAPHARI, AMARSI, WEARHAP and most recently for CogiMON, CENTAURO and EUROBENCH.

Prof. Sangbae Kim / Dr. Donghyun Kim & Gerardo Bledt (Biomimetic Robotics Lab, MIT, USA) .

Title: TBA

Bio: Prof. Sangbae Kim is the director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and an Associate Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT. He is focusing on the bio-inspired robot design by extracting principles from animals. Recent achievement includes the development of the MIT Cheetah capable of stable outdoor running up to 13mph and autonomous jumping over an obstacles at an efficiency of animals. This achievement was covered by more than 300 media articles.

Matthieu Masselin (Wandercraft, France).

Title: On making millions of different people walk again

Bio: Following a first experience in management consulting at BCG, Matthieu joined Wandercraft at its beginnings. He led the command team from 2013, in charge of algorithms & features, before taking on the role of CEO in 2018. In this capacity, he led two successful funding rounds for 25M€, established strong relationships with rehabilitation key opinion leaders, and brought Atalante, Wandercraft product, to market through CE Mark. Since then, he has closed Atalante first sales and is now focusing on the strong traction happening in Europe, bringing Atalante to the US market by getting FDA clearance, and leveraging the invaluable medical and technological assets built at Wandercraft to develop a personal version of its product.

Dr. Claudio Semini (Dynamic Legged Systems Lab, Istituto Italiano di Tecnologia (IIT), Italy).

Title: Quadruped robots for Heavy-Duty Operations

Bio: Claudio Semini is the head of IIT's Dynamic Legged Systems (DLS) lab. He holds an MSc degree from ETH Zurich in electrical engineering and information technology. He spent 2 years in Tokyo for his research: MSc thesis at the Hirose Lab at Tokyo Tech and staff engineer at the Toshiba R&D center in Kawasaki working on mobile service robotics. During his PhD and subsequent PostDoc at IIT, he developed the quadruped robot HyQ and worked on its control. Since 2012 he leads the DLS lab. His research focus lies on the construction and control of highly dynamic and versatile legged robots in real-world environments. He has published over 90 articles in journals and peer-reviewed conferences. He is a co-founder and chair of the IEEE RAS Technical Committee on Robot Mechanisms and Design. He was the coordinator of the ECHORD++ experiment HyQ-REAL (www.hyq-real.eu) and currently heads the IIT side of the Moog/IIT joint lab.

Dr. Nicolas Hudson (CSIRO, Australia) .

Title: CSIRO Dynamic Hexapod - Development and Deployment in the DARPA Subterranean Challenge

Dr. Avik De & Dr. Jeff Duperret (Ghost Robotics, USA) .

Title: Designing power-efficient quadrupedal robots for commercial applications at Ghost Robotics

Bio: Dr. Avik De is the co-founder and CTO of Ghost Robotics, a company which develops and sells four-legged robots for harsh environments. He is interested into modular/compositional control of dynamic locomotion in a way that generalizes across platforms (quadruped, tailed biped) and behaviours (hopping, running), as well as the design of dynamic locomotor systems.