Henrique Ferrolho

Henrique Ferrolho

Robotics Technical Lead at ALL3 · PhD

I make robots move, and build tools that show how.

I work on motion planning, trajectory optimisation, and whole-body control for legged robots and manipulators. Outside work I build open-source hardware and interactive simulations, and explain them on YouTube.

Fig. 1 — rotary inverted pendulum, liveLOADING
The £20 rotary inverted pendulum next to a £4,500 lab version.

drag the pendulum to push it

The £20 pendulum’s own 689-parameter network, driving a MuJoCo model of the rig in your browser.

1.4k

GitHub stars across projects

740k+

views on YouTube

7

peer-reviewed papers

13

years of side projects, since 2013

01Selected work

Things I’ve built

All 18 projects

02Research

Robust motion, planned ahead

My PhD at the University of Edinburgh asked how to plan dynamic motions that stay feasible when the world pushes back — making robustness to disturbances part of the optimisation itself, not an afterthought for the controller.

Direct transcription · rigid-body dynamics · force polytopes · legged loco-manipulation on ANYmal, Valkyrie, and TALOS.

03Log

Recently

Talks & service
  1. Co-organised “The Art of Robustness: Surviving Failures in Robotics”, a workshop at IROS 2025 in Hangzhou.

  2. Seminar on trajectory optimisation with whole-body dynamics for Georgia Tech’s AI4OPT PhD course.

  3. Invited talk at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI).

  4. Co-organised “Tactile Sensing for General Purpose Robot Learning” at RSS 2024 in Delft.

  5. RoLoMa — robust loco-manipulation for quadrupeds with arms — published in Autonomous Robots.

  6. Talk at JuliaCon 2023, MIT: using Julia to optimise trajectories for robots with legs.

  7. Defended my PhD, “Trajectory Optimisation for Legged Robots”, at Edinburgh — with no corrections.