Summary
Jonathan Hurst is a co-founder and the Chief Robot Officer of Agility Robotics, and a professor of robotics at Oregon State University, where his research on dynamic bipedal locomotion laid the technical foundation for the company’s Digit robot.
Career
Hurst holds a B.S. in mechanical engineering and an M.S. and Ph.D. in robotics, all from Carnegie Mellon University (RoboBusiness). In 2008, he joined Oregon State University as its first robotics professor, founding the university’s Dynamic Robotics Lab from scratch. Within his first year, OSU’s student robotics club grew from two or three members to more than 200, and Hurst went on to help build a robotics graduate program that made Oregon State only the third university in the United States to offer both master’s and Ph.D. degrees in robotics (Oregon Journalism Project).
Hurst’s academic research centers on the fundamental science and engineering of legged locomotion and physical interaction, spanning numerical studies of animal locomotion data, simulation of theoretical models, and the design and testing of physical legged robots. This research produced ATRIAS, a bipedal robot that demonstrated stable, efficient outdoor walking and running based on a spring-mass model of legged dynamics (Oregon State University).
In 2015, Hurst co-founded Agility Robotics alongside Damion Shelton and Mikhail Jones to commercialize the locomotion research from his lab, pulling in graduate students and former lab members to help start the company. He continues to hold both roles, serving as Agility’s Chief Robot Officer (previously Chief Technology Officer) while remaining a full-time Oregon State faculty member, and has described his more recent research focus as merging machine learning with engineered locomotion control (Oregon Journalism Project; Agility Robotics).
Source Notes
This profile draws on an Oregon Journalism Project interview, Hurst’s Oregon State University faculty page, his RoboBusiness speaker biography, and an Agility Robotics blog post describing his research approach.