Make Every Step an Experiment: Towards Terrain-aware, High-mobility Robots for Planetary Explorations
Date: Sept 26, 2025 @ 3:00-4:00PM | Location: Gates B01 | Speaker: Prof. Feifei Qian | Affiliation: USC
The seminar is open to Stanford faculty, students, and sponsors.
Abstract:
Robot-aided exploration is crucial for planetary explorations. However, many high-value scientific sites, such as Martian dunes and lunar craters, present significant challenges due to loose, deformable regolith, rugged terrain, and steep slopes, limiting the scope of scientific exploration and discoveries.
To bridge this gap, my group’s work integrates locomotion science, granular physics, and proprioceptive sensing, to develop new strategies for robots to individually and cooperatively explore challenging planetary surfaces, opening new frontiers for exploration and transforming our understanding of planetary environments.
In this talk, I will present our recent progress in two main directions. First, I will show that by strategically eliciting the force responses from loose regolith, robots could generate desired ground reaction forces and achieve substantially improved locomotion performance on deformable substrates. Second, I will show that by leveraging the high force transparency of direct-drive actuators, robots can use their legs as proprioceptive sensors to opportunistically determine the terramechanical properties of regolith from every step.
By integrating these two advancements, robots can flexibly adapt their locomotion strategies based on sensed terrain properties, leading to enhanced performance across complex terrains. Furthermore, every step becomes an opportunity to collect high-resolution environmental data, yielding unique datasets for scientific discovery. I will conclude with a few on-going directions that highlight how these advancements can enable new operation modes for future space exploration.
Bio:
Feifei Qian is an Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Southern California. Qian received her PhD in Electrical Engineering and M.S. in Physics from Georgia Institute of Technology. Prior to her appointment at USC, she worked in the GRASP lab at University of Pennsylvania as a postdoctoral fellow. Her research interests include bio-inspired robotics, legged locomotion, terrain mechanics, proprioceptive sensing and human-robot teaming, with applications to robot-aided earth and planetary explorations. Qian’s research has been recognized with NSF CAREER award, Powell Foundation Faculty Research Award, Best student paper award from the Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference, and has been featured by media outlets including BBC News, CBS News, Reuters, NPR Weekend Edition, IEEE Spectrum, Wired, and R&D Magazine. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L). She has also served as an Associate Editor for the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), the Organizing Committee for the 2025 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) conference, and the Program Committees for the 25th International Conference on Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR), the 2021 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Inclusion Program, and the 2019 Robotics Science and Systems (RSS) Pioneer Program.
Please visit https://stanfordasl.github.io/robotics_seminar/ for this quarter’s lineup of speakers. Although we encourage live in-person attendance, recordings of talks will be posted also.