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About

Perry Franklin is a leading roboticist whose work centers on reliable humanoid locomotion, manipulation, and human-robot teaming in high-stakes environments. He is best known for his pivotal role in the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC), where he helped lead Team WPI-CMU to develop a groundbreaking "no falls, no resets" strategy. This approach prioritized robust safety features in the controller to detect and prevent catastrophic failures, allowing the humanoid robot Atlas to operate without physical human intervention during the simulated disaster mission. His most-cited paper, "No falls, no resets: Reliable humanoid behavior in the DARPA robotics challenge" (2015), has garnered 105 citations and remains a foundational reference for resilient robot design. Franklin’s contributions are further detailed in his 2017 and 2018 works, which collectively document the team’s integration of mobility, manipulation, perception, and intuitive operator interfaces. By demonstrating that humanoid robots could reliably navigate complex, unstructured environments, Franklin’s research has directly influenced the development of disaster-response robotics and advanced the field’s understanding of fail-safe autonomy.