Robin Deits & Twan Koolen

Robin Deits has been excited about walking robots ever since he read a book about the MIT Leg Lab when he was ten years old. He studied physics and computer science at MIT and got his PhD in the Robot Locomotion Group at MIT CSAIL. He now specializes in optimization and control at Boston Dynamics, where he spends his time figuring out how to make Atlas run faster, jump higher, and do more than ever before. Twan Koolen has an MSc in Mechanical Engineering from Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and a PhD from the Robot Locomotion Group at CSAIL, MIT. He has worked at the Florida Institute for Human & Machine Cognition, and has been a member of the Atlas controls team for three years. Twan specializes in rigid body dynamics and optimization for robot motion control. He has worked with 5 different humanoid robot platforms over the past 15 years, enabling these robots to balance while kicking a soccer ball, recover from pushes, walk, jog, jump, and now manipulate heavy objects.