Welcome to the Robotics Lab at IIT

"I'd rather do a failed experiment than one more simulation" - visiting researcher Steve Peters

The Active Split Offset Castor

Our research is in the general area of robotics with specific attention to designing for, understanding, and exploiting the dynamics of mobile systems in the context of challenging environments. We focus on biologically-inspired design, novel vehicle designs, and robot-terrain interaction.

News in the Past Year:
4/15/12 The Robotics Lab gave a demonstration at the Museum of Science of Industry. See this link for more details. Arash Kalantari gave a talk on bio-inspired robotics and Prof. Spenko gave a talk on "How to Rebel Against Your Future Robot Overlords."

4/12/12 Gareth Meirion-Griffith had a paper accepted to the Journal of Terramechanics.

4/12/12 Gareth Meirion-Griffith successfully defended his thesis. Congratulations to Gareth for being the first Ph.D. student to graduate from the lab!

4/9/12 Don and Arash each had a paper accepted to the 36th annual ASME Mechanisms and Robotics Conference to be held here in Chicago this August.

3/31/12 Arash Kalantari's FIRST robotics team just won the industrial design award at the Minnesota regionals. Congratulations to Arash for all of his hard work mentoring the high school students.

1/02/12 Congratulations to Don Ruffatto, Chenghui Nie, and Gaerth Meirion-Griffith for having papers accepted to ICRA 2012.

11/17/11 Arash Kalantari passed his Ph.D. qualifying exams.

9/23/11 Gareth Meirion-Griffith won the Planetary Rovers and Mobile Robotics Best Paper award at the 17th International Conference of the International Society for Terrain-Vehicle Systems.

7/16/11 Congratulations to Prof. Spenko on the one year anniversary of beating Gareth in a best of three games in racquetball.

6/26/11 Congratulations to Gareth Meirion-Griffith for the acceptance of his 2011 IROS submission.

6/20/11 Don Ruffatto won a 2011 NASA Graduate Fellowship.