Lening Li
Papers
10
Total Citations
253
H-Index
6
About
Lening Li is a robotics researcher whose work bridges the gap between reliable humanoid locomotion and formal methods for autonomous decision-making. They are best known for their pivotal contributions to the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), where they were a key member of Team WPI-CMU. Their highly cited paper, "No Falls, No Resets" (105 citations), details a groundbreaking control strategy that prioritized failure prevention over recovery, enabling the Atlas humanoid robot to operate without physical human intervention during disaster-response tasks. This work, along with their comprehensive analysis of the DRC Finals (57 citations), established Li as a leader in achieving robust, real-world humanoid performance. Beyond hardware reliability, Li has made significant advances in robot motion planning and strategic reasoning. They developed BiRRTOpt, a hybrid planner that combines sampling-based and optimization methods to overcome local minima in humanoid motion planning. More recently, Li has pioneered the use of formal methods for deceptive and time-critical planning, introducing dynamic hypergames for adversarial environments and policy synthesis for Metric Interval Temporal Logic. With over 250 total citations, Li’s research continues to shape how robots achieve both physical resilience and intelligent, constraint-aware autonomy.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1No falls, no resets: Reliable humanoid behavior in the DARPA robotics challenge105 citations · 2015
- 2What Happened at the DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals57 citations · 2018
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- 6Sampling-based approximate optimal temporal logic planning8 citations · 2017
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