Brian Satzinger
Papers
10
Total Citations
359
H-Index
8
About
Brian Satzinger is a robotics researcher whose work centers on legged locomotion, mobile manipulation, and motion planning for complex robotic systems. He is perhaps best known for his pivotal contributions to the RoboSimian project at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory — a statically stable quadrupedal robot engineered with generalized limbs capable of both dexterous manipulation and versatile mobility across challenging terrain. His seminal 2015 paper on RoboSimian's hardware design and algorithms has garnered 130 citations, establishing it as a foundational reference in the field. Satzinger played a key role in Team RoboSimian's 5th place finish at the prestigious 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals, contributing to the semi-autonomous architecture that enabled the robot to score 7 points under demanding real-world conditions. His research also explores nonlinear model predictive control for rough-terrain hopping robots, kinematic redundancy resolution, and tractable locomotion planning — addressing the practical challenge of enabling complex robots to navigate unpredictable environments reliably. With over 350 cumulative citations across his published work, Satzinger has made meaningful and lasting contributions to the advancement of capable, versatile robotic systems for real-world deployment.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
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- 3Nonlinear model predictive control for rough-terrain robot hopping51 citations · 2012
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- 5Tractable locomotion planning for RoboSimian20 citations · 2015
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- 7Series-elastic actuation prototype for rough terrain hopping12 citations · 2012
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- 10Toward agile control of a flexible-spine model for quadruped bounding2 citations · 2015