Company Profile
The Biorobotics Laboratory (BioRob in short, formerly the Biologically Inspired Robotics Group, BIRG) is part of the Institute of Bioengineering in the School of Engineering at the EPFL. We work on the computational aspects of movement control, sensorimotor coordination, and learning in animals and in robots. We are interested in using robots and numerical simulation to study the neural mechanisms underlying movement control and learning in animals, and in return to take inspiration from animals to design new control methods for robotics as well as novel robots capable of agile locomotion in complex environments. Our research interests are therefore at the intersection between robotics, computational neuroscience, nonlinear dynamical systems, and machine learning. We carry out research projects in the following areas: numerical simulations of locomotion and movement control, dynamic simulators of articulated rigid bodies, systems of coupled nonlinear oscillators for locomotion control, adaptive dynamical systems, design and control of amphibious articulated robots, control of humanoid robots, design and control of reconfigurable robots. See the Research pages for more details. Our research is currently funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the European Commission (Information Society Technologies), the EPFL, and the Swiss SystemsX initiative in Systems Biology. Previous fundings came from the US National Science Foundation, the European Space Agency, the Swiss Commission for Technology and Innovation (CTI), the French Ministère de la Recherche et de la Technologie, and Microsoft Research Cambridge.
