Our research focus
The Positronics Lab at The George Washington University investigates dynamic robotic simulation and legged robot locomotion toward our greater goal of getting robots to perform contact-intensive tasks as fluidly as humans and animals.
Two tools that we use to conduct this research are multibody dynamics and simulation with contact and impact, for which we have written and maintain the open source libraries Ravelin and Moby. Moby focuses on fast and accurate solutions using the established science of verification (ensuring that a software implementation matches the mathematical models) and validation (ensuring that the simulation matches qualitative aspects of physical systems as much as possible). We validate our simulations using real robots, namely quadrupeds and mobile manipulators.
