
Rotary Inverted Pendulum
A £20 open-source Furuta pendulum that balances itself with a 689-parameter neural network running standalone on an Arduino Nano.

Henrique Ferrolho
Robotics Technical Lead at ALL3 · PhD
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.
1.4k
GitHub stars across projects
740k+
views on YouTube
7
peer-reviewed papers
13
years of side projects, since 2013
01Selected work

A £20 open-source Furuta pendulum that balances itself with a 689-parameter neural network running standalone on an Arduino Nano.

Turn a £5 VL53L5CX multi-zone ToF sensor and an IMU into a real-time 3D point-cloud viewer and room mapper.

Browse 81+ robots from 35+ brands in the browser, with real-time inverse kinematics, manipulability ellipsoids, and force polytopes.

A browser-based viewer for Thermal Master P3/P1 USB thermal cameras. Plug in, open the page, no install — driven directly over WebUSB.

Trajectory Optimisation for Robot Arms — describe a task at a high level and get a full, dynamically consistent trajectory back.

Learn what P, I, and D actually do by tuning a controller on a simulated cart, with live plots and performance metrics.
Real-time monocular hand tracking on Apple Silicon — MediaPipe live at ~40 fps, WiLoR meshes offline — aimed at teleoperating a robot hand.
02Research
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.
JournalAuRo 2023
JournalAuRo 2022
03Log
Seminar on trajectory optimisation with whole-body dynamics for Georgia Tech’s AI4OPT PhD course.
Invited talk at the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI).
Co-organised “Tactile Sensing for General Purpose Robot Learning” at RSS 2024 in Delft.
RoLoMa — robust loco-manipulation for quadrupeds with arms — published in Autonomous Robots.
Talk at JuliaCon 2023, MIT: using Julia to optimise trajectories for robots with legs.
Defended my PhD, “Trajectory Optimisation for Legged Robots”, at Edinburgh — with no corrections.