The development of legged robots with capabilities close to those of animals opens new and valuable possibilities, such as reaching distant points through rough or slopped terrains, detecting survivors in earthquake ruins or workers in mine tunnels, helping in fire-fighting or de-mining tasks, or even exploring planets. The team’s research aims at advancing the state of the art in legged locomotion and more specifically in efficient and agile quadruped locomotion through the development of novel designs and control methods. More specifically, our goals focus on achieving efficiency, high-speed, robustness and versatility in quadruped robots.

Building Laelaps II legs.

For complete publications list see here

• Koutsoukis, Κ. and Papadopoulos, Ε., “On the Effect of Robotic Leg Design on Energy Efficiency,” Proc. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA ’21), Xi’an, China, May 30-June 5, 2021.

• Mastrogeorgiou, A., ElBahrawy, Y., Kecskeméthy, A., and Papadopoulos, E., “Slope Handling for Quadruped Robots Using Deep Reinforcement Learning and Trajectory Planning,” Proc. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS ’20), Las Vegas, NV, USA, Oct. 25-29, 2020.

• Zournatzis, I., Koutsoukis, K., Machairas, K., Kecskeméthy, A., and Papadopoulos, E., “Maera: A Hybrid Wheeled-Legged Robot designed for Research and Education,” 11th International Conference on Robotics in Education (RiE), Bratislava, Slovakia, April 22-24, 2020.

• Zournatzis I., Koutsoukis K., Machairas K., Kecskeméthy A., Papadopoulos, E., “Maera: A Hybrid Wheeled-Legged Robot Designed for Research and Education,”In: Lepuschitz W., Merdan M., Koppensteiner G., Balogh R., Obdržálek D. (eds) Robotics in Education. RiE 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1316. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-67411-3_22.

• Machairas, K., and Papadopoulos, E., “Designing gaits of constant forward velocity and body height,” IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS ‘18), Madrid, Spain, October, 1-5, 2018.

• Machairas, K. and Papadopoulos, E., “An Active Compliance Controller for Quadruped Trotting,” 24th Mediterranean Conference on Control and Automation (MED ‘16), Athens, Greece, June 21-24, 2016.

• Koutsoukis, Κ. and Papadopoulos, Ε., “On Passive Quadrupedal Bounding with Flexible Linear Torso,” invited, International Journal of Robotics, Vol. 4, no. 2, November 2015, pp. 1-8.

• Nikolakakis, A., Kontolatis, I., Cherouvim, N., Chatzakos P., and Papadopoulos, E., “Implementation of a Quadruped Robot Bounding/ Pronking Gait Using a Multipart Controller,” Special Session on “Vehicle Dynamics and Control”, 2010 ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Conference, September 13-15, 2010, in Cambridge, MA, USA.