Robotics Lab

The Boston Dynamics Spot serves as our primary quadrupedal platform, equipped with a high-degree-of-freedom arm for mobile manipulation and physical interaction. We leverage its locomotion capabilities for autonomous navigation across large-scale, multi-floor environments, both indoors and outdoors. Spot drives our research in semantic 3D scene understanding, embodied question-answering, exploration, and cross-morphology non-verbal human-robot interaction.

Pepper is a humanoid robot designed for social interaction in human-centered spaces. Equipped with RGB-D sensors, holonomic locomotion, and built-in communication skills, it can recognize faces and respond with engaging gestures and speech. We use Pepper for our social human-robot interaction research, for instance, to automatically generate context-sensitive expressive body language using modulated animation principles and multimodal foundation models.

Darly is a custom platform designed for expressive social human-robot interaction. It has a 6-degree-of-freedom (dof) neck mechanism, a 2-dof laser pointing device, and a 2-dof differential drive system, as well as the option to carry a mobile manipulator. It accommodates two SICK laser scanners, 2 cameras, and an industry-standard embedded RTOS system with a C++ API. In our research, Daryl empirically demonstrated that body language can be a highly legible way to communicate affect even in the absence of facial mimicry or gestures.

Spencer is a battle-tested and well-travelled mobile robot which was developed for the EU-funded research project of the same name. This 250kg, 1.95m tall platform is capable of safely navigating highly dynamic and crowded spaces. Deployed at the Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam, its task was to guide delayed transfer passengers to their gate of departure so that they don't get lost - a costly real-world problem for many airlines. The robot is equipped with 4x RGB-D cameras, 2x SICK LiDARs, five computing units, a boarding card reader, and a charming appearance.

The Clearpath Jackal is an indoor-outdoor skid-steer mobile manipulation platform. It drives our research on semantic 3D scene understanding, embodied question answering and autonomous navigation in 3D. It is equipped with an Ouster OS0 3D LiDAR, an RGB-D camera, and a Kinova Gen3 Lite lightweight arm. Jackal is our calm-spirited, reliable, bread-and-butter mobile research platform, which never lets us down. 

The two TurtleBot 4 platforms for mobile robotics education are built on the iRobot Create 3 platform, are fitted with a Raspberry Pi 5, come fully integrated with ROS2, and open-source development kit and large community support. They are equipped with a 2D RPLIDAR for localization and mapping and a front-facing RGB-D camera for depth perception. In our lab, the two TurtleBot 4s serve as essential tools for teaching. For example, within our student team projects, they navigate our hallways as snack- and coffee-delivery robots.

The two Franka Emika Panda are 7-dof manipulator arms, equipped with high-resolution torque sensors in all seven axes and a specialized gripper for sensitive, compliant interaction. We use the Panda arms in our research, for example, for cross-morphology non-verbal human-robot interaction, or for (VLA-based) manipulation tasks.

The historical robots, Baxter and PR2, are currently in their well-deserved hibernation until a good soul brings them back to life (or until Skynet does that for us).