I am currently working at Boston Dynamics/Google. I graduated from Carnegie Mellon University's Robotics Institute in 2013. My advisor was Chris Atkeson. In 2008, I received a B.S.E. in Mechanic and Aerospace Engineering from Princeton University.
I am interested in control of high degree-of-freedom nonlinear dynamic systems in the presence of large external disturbances and modeling error. My research has focused on bipedal walking. I try to develop state space controllers for walking that do not rely on trajectories or any notion of nominal motion. The goal is to make the walking system robust to large disturbances by making controllers that are stable for large regions of state space.
I was a contestant on The Big Brain Theory: Pure Genius, a design and build competition show on Discovery Channel. You can go here for my behind-the-scenes notes or to Facebook for news and Facebooky stuff.
Eric C. Whitman and Christopher G. Atkeson. "Control of a Walking Biped Using a Combination of Simple Policies." Proc. of Humanoids 2009, Paris.
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Eric C. Whitman and Christopher G. Atkeson. "Control of Instantaneously Coupled Systems Applied to Humanoid Walking." Proc. of Humanoids 2010, Nashville.
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Eric C. Whitman and Christopher G. Atkeson. "Multiple Model Robust Dynamic Programming." Proc. of American Controls Conference 2012, Montreal.
Jiuguang Wang, Eric C. Whitman and Mike Stilman. "Whole-Body Trajectory Optimization for Humanoid Falling." Proc. of American Controls Conference 2012, Montreal.
Eric C. Whitman, Benjamin J. Stephens, and Christopher G. Atkeson. "Torso Rotation for Push Recovery Using A Simple Change of Variables." Proc. of Humanoids 2012, Osaka.
Whitman, Eric. “Optimization-Based Policy Search for Control of Periodic Systems.” Poster Presentation at Dynamic Walking 2009, Vancouver.
Whitman, Eric, and Christopher G. Atkeson. "Control of a Walking Biped Using a Combination of Simple Policies." Poster Presentation at Humanoids 2009, Paris.
Whitman, Eric. “Control of Humanoid Walking as an Instantaneously Coupled System.” Poster Presentation at Dynamic Walking 2011, Jena.