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About

Robert Ellenberg is a robotics researcher whose work centers on humanoid robot locomotion, manipulation, and whole-body motion planning—particularly for challenging, real-world environments. His most significant contributions lie in developing motion planning and control strategies for ladder climbing, a critical capability for robots operating in industrial and disaster-response settings. His 2014 video paper on DRC-Hubo’s ladder climbing for the DARPA Robotics Challenge, along with related work from 2013, each garnered 20 citations, demonstrating the community’s interest in this niche. Ellenberg also explored autonomous robot dance, creating systems that extract audio features in real time to generate synchronized motion, with applications in performance and choreography. In humanoid throwing, he introduced methods for designing collision-free trajectories using sparse reachable maps, enabling velocity control for high-degree-of-freedom robots. His work on miniature humanoids as surrogate platforms helped lower the barrier for labs studying bipedal gait and human-robot interaction. Notable achievements include the development of the skewed rotation plane (SRP) waist joint, which expands a humanoid’s range of motion beyond simple bending, and a contact wrench space stability estimator tailored for vertical climbing scenarios. Ellenberg’s research bridges fundamental motion planning with practical hardware implementation, advancing the frontier of humanoid autonomy in unstructured environments.