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About

Chelsea Lau is a robotics researcher whose work spans semi-autonomous mobile manipulation, locomotion planning, and pediatric rehabilitation robotics. Her most significant contributions center on the RoboSimian platform, where she played a key role in the team’s 5th-place finish at the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals—a competition demanding robust, adaptable hardware and software for disaster response. Her paper on this achievement has garnered 86 citations, reflecting its impact on the field. Lau also advanced motion planning with the development of Smooth RRT-Connect, an extension of the RRT algorithm that generates smooth, dynamically feasible trajectories by respecting velocity and acceleration limits, earning 26 citations. Her work on tractable locomotion planning for RoboSimian (20 citations) addressed the challenge of kinematic redundancy in complex environments, proposing a reduced-dimension RRT approach. Beyond disaster robotics, Lau contributed to pediatric rehabilitation with the REACH robot, using motion capture to create engaging, motivational exercises for children with hemiplegic cerebral palsy. This work demonstrates her commitment to translating robotics into real-world therapeutic applications, bridging technical innovation and human-centered design.