Planning humanoid falls: IROS 2015 paper treats falling as dynamic programming over contacts
chris_j_paxton · x · 2026-10-13
Alloy Robotics visualized the IROS 2015 paper "Multiple contact planning for minimizing damage of humanoid falls" (Ha & Liu), which turns falling into a planning problem:
- Model a fall as a chain of inverted pendulums
- Solve contact order with dynamic programming
- Minimize the largest single impact rather than total damage
- Fall like a judoka
Robotics researcher Chris Paxton shared it, saying this line of work is really important.
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