Research - RiSE

    RiSE, Robot in Scansorial Environment, was the project I involved during my postdoc period, where I worked on one of its prototype DynaClimber, but not directly on RiSE itself. This project was a multi-school interdisciplinary legged robotic project funded by the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).  Principle investigators included Prof. D. E. Koditschek at University of Pennsylvania, Prof. R. J. Full at UC-Berkeley, Prof. M. R. Cutkosky at Stanford University, Prof. Ron Fearing at UC-Berkeley, Prof. M. Buehler at McGill University, Canada ( relocated to Boston Dynamics), Prof. A. Rizzi at Carnegie Mellon University, and Prof. Keller Autumn at Lewis & Clark College.

    The RiSE Project (Robotics in Scansorial Environments) sought to design, build, and demonstrate a biologically inspired climbing robot with behavioral capabilities that enable it to move within and around vertical terrestrial settings. The robot included an integrated onboard power source, onboard sensors and computation, and exhibited general scansorial abilities inspired and informed by our study of gecko, arthropod, and some mammalian morphology and behaviors.

    The effort focused on the design and implementation of passive, compliant, mechanically-tuned appendages, their integration into power- and computation- autonomous bodies, and the development of sensor-based control algorithms. Emphasis was on linking carefully designed mechanical structures with sensor-based strategies for adjusting stance and motion parameters, recovering from slips when traction is marginal, and thereby negotiating the terrain in a dynamical manner.