Bipedal Robots , General legged locomotion , Reinforcement Learning applications, Biomechanics, Prostheses design, Actuator design.

Bipedal Robots  

The aim of this research is to design and build bipedal robots that can achieve dynamic walking on level and rough terrain. We will adopt different designs and apply different control algorithms to the robots. Learning paradigms like reinforcement learning will also be adopted in the control algorithm. From experimentation, we wish to extract rules for general bipedal walking.

Other Research Labs

MIT Leg Laboratory (MIT, US)
Robotics/Vibration Control @ UNH (University of New Hampshire, US)
The Human Power, Biomechanics, and Robotics Laboratory (Cornell Unversity, US)
Human Engineering Laboratory (UC Berkeley, US)
Passive Walking (University of Michigan, US)
Bipedal Gait Study (Southern Methodist University, US)
Honda Humanoid Robot (Japan)
Fukuda Vachkov Laboratory (Nagoya University, Japan)
The INRIA BIP Project (France)
The Shadow Biped (UK)

General Legged Robots  

The aim of this research is to design and build legged machine that have more than two legs. We are interested to study different walking or running gaits. By building these machines, we hope to understand the mechanisms for locomotion adopted by the biological counterparts. We also wish to build machines that are able to walk dynamically and robustly over rough terrain.

Other Research Labs

Biologically Inspiried Robotics Laboratory (Case Western Reserve, Quinn, US)
Pneumatic Hexapod (University of Illinois, US)
Ambulatory Robotics Lab(McGill University, Canada)

Biomimetic Actuators  

Legged robots is required to interact with the surrounding environment. In such applications, good actuator force control is very desirable. One such actuator design is called the series elastic actuator which is adopted by MIT Leg Laboratory. It is an actuator that is connected to the external load through an elastic component. The desired force on the load is achieved by controlling the deflection of the elastic component. Series elastic actuators have many desirable properties like high bandwidth, low output impedance, shock absorption capability, etc. This research involves the design and control of the force-controlled actuator. We are interested to compare different designs, for example, rotary versus linear elastic components, steel versus elastomer elastic material, linear versus nonlinear spring. The actuator will eventually be applied to legged robots.

Other Research Labs

Leg Laboratory (MIT, US)
Biologically Inspired Actuators and sensors (NWU, US)