Papers
28
Total Citations
1,725
H-Index
19
About
Akihiko Nagakubo is a pioneering robotics researcher whose work spans tactile sensing, bio-inspired locomotion, and climbing robotics — fields in which he has made lasting and wide-ranging contributions. His early landmark achievement, the quadruped wall-climbing robot NINJA-1 (1991, 153 citations), demonstrated a machine capable of traversing floors, walls, and ceilings, a concept he continued refining through subsequent decades of quadruped locomotion research at Tokyo Institute of Technology. In bipedal robotics, Nagakubo advanced neural oscillator-based control frameworks for adaptive humanoid motion and contributed to the development of Mowgli, a musculoskeletal jumping and landing robot that tackled the formidable challenges of high-impact, high-uncertainty dynamic movement (256 citations). His conformable tactile sensor skin (2006, 313 citations) — his most-cited work — introduced a scalable, modular architecture for pressure sensing on curved surfaces, later expanded through pioneering use of electrical impedance tomography to create deformable, stretch-tolerant tactile skins. Together, these contributions reflect a researcher who consistently bridges mechanical design, sensory systems, and biological inspiration, producing innovations that have shaped modern humanoid and service robotics research.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1Conformable and scalable tactile sensor skin for curved surfaces313 citations · 2006
- 2
- 3Machine that can walk and climb on floors, walls and ceilings153 citations · 1991
- 4Walking and running of the quadruped wall-climbing robot142 citations · 2002
- 5
- 6A deformable and deformation sensitive tactile distribution sensor87 citations · 2007
- 7
- 8Quadruped walking robots at Tokyo Institute of Technology79 citations · 2009
- 9
- 10From Humanoid Embodiment to Theory of Mind66 citations · 2004