Papers
15
Total Citations
140
H-Index
7
About
Chad C. Kessens is a leading roboticist whose research focuses on enabling robots to operate reliably in dynamic, unstructured environments—from urban search and rescue and planetary exploration to military missions and household assistance. His most influential work addresses the critical challenge of autonomous self-righting, developing frameworks and metrics that allow robots to recover from tip-over events without human intervention. His 2012 paper on self-righting on sloped surfaces (31 citations) and his bio-inspired study of cockroach self-righting (22 citations) have become foundational references in the field, demonstrating how principles from biology can inform robust robot design. Kessens has also made significant contributions to manipulation under uncertainty, including patented self-sealing suction cup technology for versatile grasping (14 citations) and the FORGE framework (2025, 10 citations) for sim-to-real transfer of force-aware policies. His work on the RoMan human-scale mobile manipulator (2020) showcases his commitment to fieldable robots that can perform dangerous tasks autonomously. With over 127 total citations across his most-cited papers, Kessens continues to push the boundaries of robot resilience and dexterity in real-world environments.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1
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- 3Utilizing compliance to manipulate doors with unmodeled constraints15 citations · 2010
- 4Versatile Passive Grasping for Manipulation14 citations · 2016
- 5Toward Lateral Aerial Grasping & Manipulation Using Scalable Suction11 citations · 2019
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- 8Toward fieldable human-scale mobile manipulation using RoMan6 citations · 2020
- 9
- 10Ground-based self-righting using inertial appendage methods4 citations · 2017