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About

Miguel Abrahantes is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of reconfigurable robotics, space exploration, and autonomous systems. He is best known for his sustained contributions to tetrahedral walker robot design — a class of modular, reconfigurable robots capable of locomotion across irregular terrain — developed in collaboration with NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. Beginning in 2007, Abrahantes produced a series of influential studies modeling, constructing, and refining tetrahedral walker robots of increasing complexity, from 4-tetrahedron configurations up to 8-tetrahedron systems, with particular emphasis on gait design, motion control, and practical hardware implementation. His most-cited work, "Tetrahedral Robotics for Space Exploration," has accumulated 41 citations and helped establish the viability of this architecture for planetary and extraterrestrial mobility applications. As part of Hope College's research team, he bridged theoretical modeling and physical construction, demonstrating the approach's real-world feasibility. Later work expanded his research scope to include echolocation-based localization and mapping for mobile robots, utilizing ultrasonic sensor arrays within the Robot Operating System framework. Across more than a decade of publications, Abrahantes has amassed over 150 citations, marking him as a notable contributor to reconfigurable robotics and space-relevant robotic systems.