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About

Sotiris Apostolopoulos is a roboticist whose research centers on the control of underactuated walking robots, with a particular focus on improving the agility, energy efficiency, and robustness of dynamic locomotion. His major contributions lie in developing novel control strategies that reduce the settling time during transitions between different walking gaits. His most cited work, presented at the 2015 IEEE IROS conference (129 citations), introduces a method that commands a sequence of intermediate transitions to guide the robot’s state into the target controller’s domain of attraction, dramatically speeding up gait changes. Apostolopoulos further advanced this concept in his work on “Settling Time Reduction for Underactuated Walking Robots” (2015), applying optimal control to periodic orbit transitions. He has also addressed energy efficiency in balancing, as seen in his 2017 paper on Motion Primitive switching, which samples optimal motions to reduce power consumption without sacrificing stability. His research is critical for creating more versatile and efficient bipedal robots capable of navigating complex, real-world environments.