We are very excited to have an all star line up of keynote speakers for the IEEE International Workshop of Advanced Robotics and its Social Impact in Austin, during March 8-10, 2017: (1) Ruzena Bajcsy, Director Emerita of Citrus at the University of California at Berkeley and co-founder of the renown GRASP laboratory at the University of Pennsylvania , (2) Sabine Hauert, Professor of Swarm Robotics at the University of Bristol, TED talk speaker, and expert in science communication, (3) Mady Delvaux, member of the European Parliament and advocate of increasing digital competences in education systems, and (4) Alan Manning, a renowned UK labour economist and professor of the London School of Economics.

You can find the biographies of the speakers on this link.

Additionally, a panel in conjunction with SXSW is scheduled to take place on Friday March 10, 2017.

Dissertation-Ye-Zhao

Congratulations to Ye for successfully defending his PhD! Some of his contributions include formalizing non-periodic locomotion gait planning, using formal methods to maneuver in dynamically changing environments, and studying distributed realtime control architectures.

A new NSF grant has been awarded to our lab in collaboration with the Computer Science and Aerospace Engineering Departments to explore human-aware robotic navigation in populated environments.

Our paper, “Stabilizing Series-Elastic Point-Foot Bipeds using Whole-Body Operational Space Control”, led by student Donghyun Kim, gets accepted in TRO.

Link to Paper

Our proposal titled “Shared Laboratory Initiative” has been awarded by the LIFT Grant. Those funds will support a graduate student and a software engineer for an exciting cloud control and content management system.

Our lab receives a DURIP grant to develop and study Next Generation Humanoid Robots.

Our lab receives the UT Innovation Grant for our spin off Apptronik to commercialize high performance actuators and humanoid robots.

What a surprise!!! We celebrated the tenure of Luis, the Lab’s Head, as a family, with a warm celebration and acknowledgement of the effort from every single member of the group. The future awaits and in humanoid robotics and human-centered technologies, we are going to be making some news! Cheers!!

Click on the image below to start the Webcast:

We are pleased to post the submission of our paper “A Framework for Planning and Controlling Non-Periodic Bipedal Locomotion” for journal publication. The draft paper describing the framework can be found by clicking below:

PhD student Donghyun Kim and Dr. Sentis present their experimental work on bipedal locomotion and sensing.

very fun day talking to attendants of the Texas Tribune Festival, discussing STEM at UT Austin, and showcasing our research on cloud to hardware funded by NASA and the Longhorn Innovation Fund for Technology.

What an honor to have UT Austin’s president and Dreamer celebrating innovation at this great university.