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About

Vivek Sangwan is a robotics researcher whose work sits at the intersection of nonlinear control theory, underactuated systems, and rehabilitation robotics. His most significant contributions center on the application of **differential flatness** to the design and control of underactuated robotic manipulators and bipedal walking systems — a technically demanding area where most joints must be controlled with fewer actuators than degrees of freedom. Sangwan's most cited work (44 citations) demonstrated that underactuated open-chain planar robots can be deliberately *designed* to be differentially flat, enabling tractable trajectory planning and feedback linearization — a breakthrough that transformed an analytical challenge into a systematic design methodology. He extended this framework to bipedal locomotion, showing how limit-cycle walking gaits can be guaranteed through flatness-based design (28 citations), and later generalized the approach to n-DOF manipulators driven by just one or two actuators (28 citations). His experimental validations further strengthened the practical credibility of these methods. Beyond manipulation, Sangwan contributed early work on lower-extremity exoskeletons for gait assistance and motor rehabilitation (22 citations), reflecting a commitment to translating control theory into assistive technology. Across his body of work, Sangwan has carved a distinctive niche in making underactuated robotics both theoretically rigorous and practically viable.