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:

5/16/13 Prof. Spenko was interviewed by WBBM news on 3D printing.

4/24/13 Arash Kalantari made the Chicago Tribune (paywall) for his work with FIRST Robotics.

4/13/13 Prof. Spenko and Arash Kalantari gave talks for National Robotics Week at the Museum of Science and Industry

4/8/13 Arash Kalantari won second place in the MMAE poster competition and his FIRST robotics team won the Midwest Regional Competition. Congratulations to everybody.

11/29/12 Arash Kalantari's HyTAQ robot is getting a lot of coverage in the popular media. Check out Media for the links.

7/1/12 Arash Kalantari's walking quadrotor won the Boca Bearings Innovation Award of the month June (here)

5/17/12 Chenghui Nie, Gareth Meirion-Griffith, and Don Ruffatto gave talks at the 2012 ICRA conference.

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.