Manas Paldhe

Papers

Total Citations

H-Index

About

Manas Paldhe is a roboticist whose work focuses on advancing the locomotion capabilities of humanoid robots, with a particular emphasis on ladder climbing—a critical skill for navigating industrial and disaster-response environments. His major contributions center on developing autonomous planning and control frameworks that enable humanoid robots to climb general ladder- and stair-like structures. In his most-cited work, "Robust ladder-climbing with a humanoid robot with application to the DARPA Robotics Challenge" (33 citations), Paldhe introduced a two-component system: a multi-limbed locomotion planner that automatically generates whole-body climbing trajectories from a ladder model, and a compliance control strategy for stable execution. This research was directly applied to the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) using the DRC-Hubo robot, as detailed in his subsequent papers (20 citations each). His preliminary work on the Hubo-II+ humanoid further established foundational motion planning techniques for quasi-static, collision-free ladder climbing. Paldhe’s contributions are notable for bridging the gap between theoretical motion planning and practical, real-world deployment in high-stakes robotics competitions, demonstrating robust performance in complex, unstructured environments.