Adaptable and dynamic
Their innovative work is focussing on two things: firstly making the robot capable of adapting to new situations, learning ‘on-the-fly’ to better perform a goal; secondly, to make the robot’s movement more dynamic.

As Vijayakumar explains, ‘when we do everyday tasks like walking or running, we exploit the natural dynamics of our body. To mimic this capability in robots and generate more efficient movements is a significant challenge.’

Their walking robots are unique in being able to simultaneously adjust the stiffness, 'damping' (the amount of resistance experienced) and position at the hip, knee and ankle joints. Using this ability allows the robots to walk with human-like energy efficient gaits. Adjusting their damping and stiffness enables the robot to deal with differences in terrain and unexpected changes, as well as to undertake energetic tasks like jumping, throwing and even dancing.

Wearable robots
For the team the biggest challenge is developing technologies that can scale. As Vijayakumar points out, ‘as we consider more complex, useful and realistic robots, if the technology we develop to control them and adapt takes forever to compute, then that’s no good. Another challenge is robust sensing. Humans are good at combining all their senses to perceive the world, but issues such as noise and partial observability makes it hard to translate this capability to robotic sensors.'

Designing the robots to cope like humans continues. The team has also built prototype prosthetic robotic devices, which can interface directly with the human body and be controlled using human muscle signals. Wearable robots are science and not fiction.