Sangbae Kim has been the director of the Biomimetic Robotics Laboratory and a professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT for the last 16 years. Kim’s achievements include creating the world’s first directional adhesive inspired by gecko lizards and a climbing robot named Stickybot that utilizes the directional adhesive to climb smooth surfaces. One of Kim’s recent achievements is the development of the MIT Cheetah, a robot capable of stable running outdoors up to 13 mph and autonomous jumping over obstacles at the efficiency of animals. The design paradigm of the electric motor of the MIT cheetah is widely adopted by industries including Unitree and Boston Dynamics. Kim is a recipient of best paper awards from the ICRA (2007), King-Sun Fu Memorial TRO (2008) and IEEE/ASME TMECH (2016). Additionally, he received a DARPA YFA (2013), an NSF CAREER award (2014), a Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching (2015) and Nagamori Award (2023). He is a member of DSSG (Defense Science Study Group) 2019~2024. He gave talks at prestigious meetings such as TED xMIT, DAVOS economic Forum, Amazon MARS meetings, and Keynote speech at IROS2019. He is currently on leave from MIT and working for Meta to develop robotics technologies for home.
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