The FREE (Functional Robotics for Every Environment) Lab seeks to actualize robots that are capable of deftly and safely operating in real-world unstructured environments. Our research draws on tools and concepts from mechanics to understand the relationships between structure, force and motion, control theory to analyze and influence the behavior of dynamical systems, optimization to make decisions that balance goals and tradeoffs, and machine learning to extract useful information from data. Our research efforts combine modeling, design, and control, and can broadly be divided into the following three thrusts: