Abstract

Mobility, the capability to move from point A to point B, represents one of the fundamental and generalized capabilities of robots. Among the many ways to achieve mobility, such as propellers and wheels, robots with limbed structures, including quadrupeds, bipeds, and humanoids, have experienced rapid advancement, particularly in the past decade. The first part of this talk will take a personal peek into this revolutionary transformation in legged mobility, revisiting some techniques that shaped how machines learned to walk. On the other hand, despite these remarkable achievements in control and learning, humanoid robots continue to face critical challenges in reliability, safety, and evaluation. The second part of the talk will shift focus from building to testing, highlighting the need for scientifically grounded and statistically repeatable evaluation frameworks. Using recent results on repeatable testing and confidence-aware policy selection, the discussion emphasizes why mobility progress must be measured not only by performance but also by the trustworthiness of its tests.

About the Speaker

Dr. Bowen Weng is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Iowa State University and a roboticist. He received his Ph.D. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from The Ohio State University in 2023. Since 2016, before joining Iowa State University, he worked as a Research Engineer, Technical Specialist, and Research Scientist at Transportation Research Center Inc. on assignment to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), U.S. Department of Transportation. He is currently also chairing ASTM Committee F45.06 Legged Robot Systems for standard development.