Our lab focuses in addressing motion synthesis problems: planning, control, & estimation, centering around robots that have complex interaction with the environment. We are working on the following topics:
- Hybrid Mobile Robots: Design and control of novel mobile robots that have hybrid mobility in multi-domains. More importantly, we look into how to utilize the hybrid mobility to solve practical tasks to address societal challenges. Relevant Publication: PogoX [Wang et al, ICRA 2024].
- Data-Augmented Online Control: Augmentation of rigorous model-based approaches with efficient data-driven methods to realize online robust and adaptive locomotion behaviors in complex and unknown environments. Application domain: mobility in complex environments, e.g., sand and snow. Relevant Publication: [Zeng et al, ICRA 2025 (submitted)].
- Novel Robot Design and Co-Design: Design and Co-Design of Robot Hardware so that the robot can achieve superior performance in power, efficiency, and mobility. Relevant Publication: [Chen et al, IROS 2024], [Huang et al, Humanoids 2024].
- Kino-dynamic-contact Motion Synthesis: Handling geometric constraints in complex environment, nonlinear dynamics of high DoF robots, and contact events simultaneously. The goal is to establish a globally optimal model-based design framework to enable planning and control on humanoid robots to reason geometry, dynamics, and contact at the same time.
- Optimization based Estimation: Estimation of robot motion through corrupted sensor readings and partially known environment. Relevant Publication: [Kang et al, RAL 2024], [Kang and Xiong, ICRA 2025 (submitted)]