Robotics paper wins the outstanding paper award of the 2023 IEEE ICRA

The paper entitled “Distributed data-driven predictive control for multi-agent collaborative legged locomotion” by PhD students Randall T. Fawcett, Leila Amanzadeh, and Jeeseop Kim, together with assistant professor Kaveh Akbari Hamed and in collaboration with professor Aaron D. Ames from Caltech has been selected for the outstanding paper award of the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). 

Fawcett recently defended his PhD work in the Hybrid Dynamic Systems and Robot Locomotion (HDSRL) lab, directed by Akbari Hamed. During his time in the group, he worked on distributed planning and control of collaborative and multi-agent-legged robots with data-driven and predictive control techniques. 

Amanzadeh is a third-year Ph.D. student in the HDSRL lab who works on designing adaptive optimal control techniques for agile quadrupedal locomotion. 

Kim is a former PhD student in the lab who graduated in August 2022. He is currently a postdoctoral research fellow at Caltech. His PhD work addressed the design of distributed model predictive control algorithms for cooperative locomotion and transportation by legged robots.

Akbari Hamed's research goal is to establish a firm foundation for creating innovative algorithms to systematically design resilient and intelligent controllers for various dynamical systems with nonlinear and hybrid natures, including autonomous-legged robots and cooperative multi-agent systems.

The team also produced a video of their work with demonstrations of the dynamics in action.