NSF CAREER Award: leveraging toes for agile humanoid locomotion

Prof. Donghyun Kim has received an NSF CAREER Award for “Leveraging Toes for Energy-Efficient and Agile Humanoid Robot Locomotion.”

Human toes do a lot of quiet work — push-off, balance, adapting to terrain — and most humanoid robots ignore them entirely. Building on the lab’s PresToe and StaccaToe platforms, this project develops control algorithms that give robots real articulated toes and teach them to use them well, aiming to improve walking efficiency, increase running speed, and unlock more human-like agility over rough, unstructured terrain — capabilities that matter for disaster response, infrastructure inspection, and other physically demanding field work.

The five-year, $750K award was made while the group was at UMass Amherst. Read the UMass announcement.