ORI’s Dr. Mathieu Geisert Awarded Best Paper at TAROS 2019

Last week a group from ORI attended the Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems (TAROS) 2019 Conference. The conference this year was held at the newly build Mile End campus of the Queen Mary University of London.

Many interesting papers were presented and TAROS this year had an excellent set of keynote talks delivered from leading researchers from industry and academia.

ORI’s Dr. Mathieu Geisert was awarded the Best Paper Award for the paper ‘Contact Planning for the ANYmal Quadruped Robot using an Acyclic Reachability-Based Planner’, by M. Geisert, T. Yates, A. Orgen, P. Fernbach, and I. Havoutis.

The paper develops a contact and motion planning approach for the ANYmal quadruped. This is increasingly important for environments where the robot needs to explicitly plan footholds, a common theme in everyday environments (stairs, steps, obstacles to step over, etc) built for humans and legs. This further extends the capabilities developed by the Dynamic Robot Systems (DRS) group towards autonomous monitoring and inspection of facilities with mobile legged robots.

The work was supported by the UKRI/EPSRC ‘Robotics and AI in Nuclear’ (RAIN) Hub and the ERC H2020 ‘Memory of Motion’ (memmo) project.