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About

G. Clark Haynes is a robotics researcher whose work centers on legged locomotion, biologically inspired robot design, and autonomous navigation in complex and hazardous environments. He is perhaps best known for his foundational contributions to the RiSE (Robots in Scansorial Environments) project, which produced the first legged machine capable of locomotion on both flat ground and vertical surfaces — a landmark achievement documented in his most-cited paper (425 citations). His subsequent work on rapid pole-climbing quadrupeds (174 citations) demonstrated that legged robots could achieve dynamic, high-speed climbing of real-world structures, pushing the boundaries of what autonomous machines could physically accomplish. Haynes also played a central role in developing CHIMP, Carnegie Mellon's humanoid disaster-response robot designed for dangerous, degraded environments (123 citations), which competed in DARPA's Robotics Challenge. His theoretical contributions include foundational work on gait transitions and disturbance recovery in legged systems, enabling more robust autonomous navigation across unstructured terrain. A particularly notable interdisciplinary thread in his research bridges robotics and animal locomotion — his study of dog gait on rough terrain offers rare empirical grounding for biomechanical hypotheses. Across more than a decade of work, Haynes has consistently advanced the science of robots that move intelligently through the physical world.