In recent years, many wheeled, bipedal, and quadrupedal robots have been released to market. Yet, robots have not had a meaningful presence in public spaces and have instead been mainly restricted to controlled environments like factories and warehouses. What is holding robots back from making wider impacts on our world? This thesis presents an interdisciplinary investigation into the difficulties that robots currently face by synthesizing approaches in control theory, social science, and public policy. Each of these often siloed fields hold insights that will be invaluable to the development of robots that are safe, trustworthy, and equitable. The first part of this thesis presents methods that analyze the performance of legged robot locomotion and generate trajectories that are safe and robust when operating in uncertain envi- ronments. This work is necessary because legged robots are hybrid systems, meaning they un- dergo discontinuous changes in state and dynamics when their feet touchdown on the ground. These discontinuities violate assumptions key to many traditional control architectures. The pre- sented hybrid systems analysis utilizes the fundamental solution matrix, which characterizes the evolution of initial errors through a trajectory. With this analysis, novel trajectory optimization methods are presented that explicitly reason about the stability and convergence of hybrid tra- jectories, leading to improved tracking performance for a variety of systems. This thesis also presents work that investigates legal theory and community attitudes to de- velop frameworks for equitable robot design. Specifically, I focus on grounding robot design not just in stakeholder and customer preferences, but also in the needs of all community members regardless of their familiarity with robots. This work addresses how current self-defense law can inform robot design as well as how community attitudes toward robots can inform both robot design and future policies. These findings will allow robots to make positive contributions in our vast, human world.

Read the proposal document here.