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About

Yasunori Kawanami is a pioneering roboticist whose work spans humanoid, quadruped, and wheeled-legged robot design and control. His research focuses on whole-body force control, elastic actuation, and real-time perceptive motion—enabling robots to operate safely and dynamically in human environments. Kawanami’s most influential work, “Whole-body cooperative force control for a two-armed and two-wheeled mobile robot using Generalized Inverse Dynamics and Idealized Joint Units” (2010, 36 citations), introduced a unified framework for coordinating joint forces to achieve diverse motion objectives, from position to impedance control. He later led the development of Tachyon, a high-payload quadruped robot featuring a novel series-parallel elastic actuator (SPEA) for robust, energy-efficient locomotion (2021, 10 citations). His recent work on Tachyon 3, a six-wheeled-telescopic-legged robot, integrates control barrier functions with analytical smoothing for real-time perceptive motion (2024, 3 citations). Kawanami also contributed to Sony’s iconic QRIO and PINO humanoid projects, sharing lessons from bringing small humanoid robots from R&D to commercial success (2023, 8 citations). His career demonstrates a rare ability to bridge theoretical control theory with practical, high-performance robot hardware.