Our lab’s work was recently featured in the landing page or Penn and Penn Today! In collaboration with NASA and several partner universities, we’re developing TRUSSES that combines the strengths of legged and wheeled robots to enable multi-robot teams to explore areas previously too steep or unstable for traditional rovers. Read more about how we’re helping shape the future of planetary exploration 🚀: Penn Engineering: Navigating the Landscapes of Lunar Robots on the Moon and Mars.

Congratulations to Jeffery, Kayleen, Sophie, and Yi Lu! They have presented their research in the Penn Undergraduate Research Mentoring Program (PURM) poster session, and we couldn’t be more proud! Read more about the poster presentation here.

As part of the TRUSSES project, Dr. Cynthia Sung and PhD student Shivangi Misra took a team of legged and wheeled robots out to White Sands National Park, a lunar-analogue environment, to test cooperative locomotion. These robots were able to connect to one another with rigid, extendable arms and climbed sandy dune slopes of up to 18 degrees while remaining tethered, a first-of-its-kind demonstration! During the expedition, our team also collected data to study the interaction forces between the robots as well as with the dune surface. This will help us test our hypothesis that physically connected robots can stabilize one another and climb sandy sloped terrain with greater success than individual robots!

Special thanks to Feifei Qian and Ryan Ewing for guiding us to suitable dune sites, helping measure terrain properties as well as coordinating the logistics for smooth and safe field work!

Congratulations to Zhiyuan (Annie) Yang and Neel Mulay for receiving the Best Poster Award at the “2nd Unconventional Robots: Rethinking Robotic Systems Beyond Convention” workshop! We are so proud of you!

Congratulations to Zhiyuan (Annie) Yang and Gabriel Unger for presenting their new work at the “2nd Unconventional Robots: Rethinking Robotic Systems Beyond Convention” workshop and to Daniel Feshbach for presenting his work at the “ICRA 2025 Doctoral Consortium” workshop, on the day 1 of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation!