Patrick Spieler
California Institute of Technology, Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Papers
7
Total Citations
215
H-Index
5
About
Patrick Spieler is a robotics researcher whose work spans two dynamic frontiers: agile multi-modal locomotion and autonomous off-road navigation. He first gained widespread recognition with his landmark 2021 paper on a bipedal robot capable of flying, slacklining, and skateboarding — a tour de force in synchronized multi-modal control that has accumulated over 158 citations and captured the imagination of the broader robotics community. This work demonstrated how tightly coupled propulsion and legged systems can dramatically expand a robot's behavioral repertoire. More recently, Spieler has turned his attention to robust autonomous navigation in challenging off-road environments. Through projects like RoadRunner and its multi-resolution extension, he has pioneered learning-based traversability estimation that enables high-speed navigation using onboard sensing alone — addressing the critical limitations of sparse LiDAR data at range. His work on radar-based state estimation further reinforces resilience under degraded perceptual conditions. He also contributed to the prestigious DARPA Subterranean Challenge through Team CoSTAR's NeBula framework, and developed PARSEC, an aerial manipulator for deploying payloads on vertical cliff faces. Collectively, Spieler's research pushes robots into environments — rugged terrain, underground tunnels, sheer rock faces — once considered inaccessible to autonomous systems.
Research Focus
Key Achievements
Top Papers
- 1A bipedal walking robot that can fly, slackline, and skateboard158 citations · 2021
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