Diego is currently pursuing a PhD in the Department of Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics (MEAM) at the University of Pennsylvania, working with Kod*Lab within the GRASP lab in the field of dynamic robotic locomotion. His focus now is transitional quadruped locomotion with a focus on the effect of internal core degree of freedoms on increasing agility of new behaviors.

Bibliography

[1] J. D. Caporale, B. W. McInroe, C. Ning, T. Libby, R. J. Full, and D. E. Koditschek, “Coronal Plane Spine Twisting Composes Shape To Adjust the Energy Landscape for Grounded Reorientation,” in 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), May 2020, pp. 8052–8058. doi: 10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9197026. (video)

[2] W. Chen, S. Misra, J. D. Caporale, D. E. Koditschek, S. Yang, and C. R. Sung, “A Tendon-Driven Origami Hopper Triggered by Proprioceptive Contact Detection,” in 2020 3rd IEEE International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), May 2020, pp. 373–380. doi: 10.1109/RoboSoft48309.2020.9116040. (video)

[3] V. Vasilopoulos et al., “Reactive Semantic Planning in Unexplored Semantic Environments Using Deep Perceptual Feedback,” IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 5, no. 3, pp. 4455–4462, Jul. 2020, doi: 10.1109/LRA.2020.3001496. (video)

[4] A. De, T. T. Topping, J. D. Caporale, and D. E. Koditschek, “Mode-Reactive Template-Based Control in Planar Legged Robots,” IEEE Access, vol. 10, pp. 16010–16027, 2022, doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2022.3148921. 

Before the PhD

In 2013, he received a  B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the California Institute of Technology, focusing in control theory and robotics with special project work involving prototype rovers at JPL. In 2019, he received his M.S. in Robotics from the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at the University of Pennsylvania. From 2013 to 2016, he worked as a Mechanical and Project Engineer and then as Innovation Lead at Iris Technology, a tactical and aerospace power solutions company in Irvine, CA.