Dhionis Sako

About

Dhionis Sako is a leading roboticist whose work pushes the boundaries of agile, whole-body autonomy for legged and wheeled robots. His research centers on motion planning, control, and learning for dynamic locomotion and mobile manipulation, with a particular focus on quadrupedal and wheeled-quadruped platforms. Sako’s major contributions include pioneering fully learned approaches to agile navigation, as demonstrated in his highly cited work on ANYmal parkour (216 citations), which enables quadrupeds to traverse complex, obstacle-rich environments. He also developed the Keep Rollin’ framework (168 citations), tightly integrating wheeled and walking modes for seamless, dynamic locomotion, and introduced ALMA (128 citations), a unified framework for articulated locomotion and manipulation on torque-controllable robots. Earlier in his career, Sako contributed to agricultural robotics with a fuzzy-controlled gripper for delicate strawberry harvesting (107 citations). His recent work on learning-based design for parallel-elastic actuators (2023) further exemplifies his commitment to co-optimizing hardware and control. With over 650 total citations, Sako’s research has significantly advanced the capability of robots to operate in unstructured, real-world environments, making him a key figure in modern legged robotics.

Research Focus

Key Achievements

Top Papers

1. 1
   ANYmal parkour: Learning agile navigation for quadrupedal robots

   216 citations · 2024
2. 2
   Keep Rollin’ - Whole-Body Motion Control and Planning for Wheeled Quadrupedal Robots

   168 citations · 2019
3. 3
   ALMA - Articulated Locomotion and Manipulation for a Torque-Controllable Robot

   128 citations · 2019
4. 4
   Design and fuzzy control of a robotic gripper for efficient strawberry harvesting

   107 citations · 2014
5. 5
   Learning-Based Design and Control for Quadrupedal Robots With Parallel-Elastic Actuators

   31 citations · 2023

Key Collaborators

Contact & Links