Ludovic Righetti

Associate Professor

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Ludovic Righetti is an Associate Professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department and in the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the Tandon School of Engineering of New York University. He is also a member of the Center for Urban Science and Progress.

He leads the Machines in Motion Laboratory, where his research focuses on the planning and control of movements for autonomous robots, with a special emphasis on legged locomotion and manipulation. He is more broadly interested in questions at the intersection of decision-making, automatic control, optimization, applied dynamical systems and machine learning and their application to physical systems.

He studied at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland) where he received an engineering diploma in Computer Science (eq. M.Sc.) in 2004 and a Doctorate in Science in 2008 under the supervision of Professor Auke Ijspeert. Between March 2009 and August 2012, he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Computational Learning and Motor Control Lab with Professor Stefan Schaal (University of Southern California). In September 2012 he started the Movement Generation and Control Group at the Max-Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems in Tübingen, Germany where he became a W2 Independent Research Group Leader in September 2015. He moved to New York University in September 2017.

He has received several awards, most notably the 2010 Georges Giralt PhD Award given by the European Robotics Research Network (EURON) for the best robotics thesis in Europe, the 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) Best Paper Award, the 2016 IEEE Robotics and Automation Society Early Career Award and the 2016 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize from the German Research Foundation.

Research Interests

Robotics and applications, optimal control, reinforcement learning, robotics societal/ethical issues, legged robots, robotic manipulation

Education

2008 Doctorate in Science, Robotics, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

2004 Engineering Diploma in Computer Science, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland

Publications

Please refer to the Machines in Motion Laboratory website or the Google Scholar page

Awards

2016 Heinz Maier-Leibnitz Prize, awarded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research
2016 IEEE RAS Early Career Award “for contributions to the theory of, and experiments in, robot locomotion and manipulation”, awarded by the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society
2016 Finalist for the best interactive session award at the International Conference on Humanoid Robots (A convex model of humanoid momentum dynamics for multi-contact motion generation, B. Ponton, A. Herzog, S. Schaal and L. Righetti)
2016 Finalist for the best paper award at the International Conference on Robotics and Mechatronics (Stepping stabilization using a combination of dcm tracking and step adjustment, M. Khadiv, A. Herzog, S.A.A. Moosavian, S. Schaal and L. Righetti)
2012 Finalist for the best paper award at the International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Encoding of Periodic and their Transient Motions by a Single Dynamic Movement Primitive, J. Ernesti, L. Righetti, M. Do, T. Asfour and S. Schaal)
2011 Best paper award at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (Online movement adaptation based on previous sensor experiences, P. Pastor, L. Righetti, M. Kalakrishnan, S. Schaal)
2010 Georges Giralt PhD Award for the best PhD thesis in Europe in the field of robotics (given by the European Robotics Research Network (EURON))
2006 Finalist for the best student paper award at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Programmable central pattern generators: an application to biped locomotion control, L. Righetti, A.J. Ijspeert)
2004 Jean Landry Award for the diploma thesis Control and Synchronization with Nonlinear Dynamical Systems for an Application to Humanoid Robotics

Research Briefs

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Enabling Remote Whole-Body Control with 5G Edge Computing

Huaijiang Zhu, a Ph.D. student in electrical and computer engineering was lead author.

There are many real-world — and, someday, off-world — applications for light-weight, energy-efficient, fully autonomous robots. Yet the more autonomous a robot is, the greater its computational requirements. Onboarding the components to handle this computational function adds weight, cost and reduces potential for applications in hostile environments.

It might thus be desirable to offload intensive computation--not only sensing and planning, but also low-level whole-body control--to remote servers in order to reduce on-board computational needs. Fifth Generation (5G) wireless cellular technology, with its low latency and high bandwidth capabilities, has the potential to unlock cloud-based high performance control of complex robots. However, state-of-the-art control algorithms for legged robots can only tolerate very low control delays, which even ultra-low latency 5G edge computing can sometimes fail to achieve.

In this work, the investigators, led by Ludovic Righetti, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering and mechanical and aerospace engineering, and a member of NYU WIRELESS, investigate the problem of cloud-based whole-body control of legged robots over a 5G link. Their novel approach consists of a standard optimization-based controller on the network edge and a local linear, approximately optimal controller that significantly reduces on-board computational needs while increasing robustness to delay and possible loss of communication. Simulation experiments on humanoid balancing and walking tasks that includes a realistic 5G communication model demonstrate significant improvement of the reliability of robot locomotion under jitter and delays likely to experienced in 5G wireless links.

The team included Kai Pfeiffer, a postdoctoral researcher, and Manali Sharma, a master's student in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering; Sundeep Rangan, professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate director of NYU WIRELESS; and Marco Mezzavilla, a research scientist at NYU WIRELESS.

The project, funded in part by the National Science Foundation National Robotics Initiative and OPPO Mobile Telecommunications, will be presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems in October, 2020.

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