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About

Yuki Shirai is a robotics researcher whose work spans climbing robotics, dexterous manipulation, and motion planning for contact-rich systems. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering contributions to free-climbing robots capable of navigating extreme terrain, beginning with his widely cited 2018 work on passive spine grippers (69 citations), which demonstrated how robots could reliably grasp rough rocky surfaces on cliff walls. This foundation led to SCALER (34 citations), one of the first high-degree-of-freedom quadrupedal robots capable of free-climbing under Earth's gravity, traversing overhangs and ceilings with remarkable mechanical efficiency. Beyond locomotion, Shirai has made significant contributions to manipulation, developing frameworks for tactile tool manipulation (28 citations) and robust pivoting strategies that exploit frictional stability through bilevel optimization (20 citations), addressing the fundamental challenge of enabling robots to interact with novel objects under physical uncertainty. His simultaneous contact-rich grasping and locomotion framework (26 citations) elegantly bridges these two domains through distributed optimization. Shirai's broader portfolio also encompasses adaptive force control, modular multi-agent delivery robotics, and contact-smoothing theory for controller synthesis. With work spanning hardware design, planning algorithms, and control theory, his research consistently pushes the boundary of what robots can physically achieve in unstructured, contact-rich environments.