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Safety concerns during the operation of legged robots must be addressed to enable their widespread use. Machine learning-based control methods that use model-based constraints provide promising means to improve robot safety. This study…

Enforcing balance of multi-limbed robots in multiple non-coplanar unilateral contact settings is challenging when a subset of such contacts are also induced in motion tasks. The first contribution of this paper is in enhancing the…

Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…

In a world designed for legs, quadrupeds, bipeds, and humanoids have the opportunity to impact emerging robotics applications from logistics, to agriculture, to home assistance. The goal of this survey is to cover the recent progress toward…

The paper takes the first step towards the de- velopment of a control framework for underactuated flying humanoid robots. These robots may thus have the capacities of flight, contact locomotion, and manipulation, and benefit from…

Recently several hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for application on torque controlled robots. They have important theoretical benefits but have never been implemented on a…

In this paper, we propose a novel approach on controlling wheel-legged quadrupedal robots using pose optimization and force control via quadratic programming (QP). Our method allows the robot to leverage the whole-body motion and the wheel…

Reaction force-aware control is essential for legged climbing robots to ensure a safer and more stable operation. This becomes particularly crucial when navigating steep terrain or operating in microgravity environments, where excessive…

Continuum robotic grasping, inspired by biological appendages such as octopus arms and elephant trunks, provides a versatile and adaptive approach to object manipulation. Unlike conventional rigid-body grasping, continuum robots leverage…

Controlling robots that dynamically engage in contact with their environment is a pressing challenge. Whether a legged robot making-and-breaking contact with a floor, or a manipulator grasping objects, contact is everywhere. Unfortunately,…

The deployment of robots in industrial and civil scenarios is a viable solution to protect operators from danger and hazards. Shared autonomy is paramount to enable remote control of complex systems such as legged robots, allowing the…

This paper presents a new technique to control highly redundant mechanical systems, such as humanoid robots. We take inspiration from two approaches. Prioritized control is a widespread multi-task technique in robotics and animation: tasks…

The ability of a soft robot to perform specific tasks is determined by its contact configuration, and transitioning between configurations is often necessary to reach a desired position or manipulate an object. Based on this observation, we…

Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured terrain. However, as planetary robots' power and thermal…

Robotic loco-manipulation tasks often involve contact-rich interactions with the environment, requiring the joint modeling of contact force and robot position. However, recent visuomotor policies often focus solely on learning position or…

Complex robotic systems require whole-body controllers to deal with contact interactions, handle closed kinematic chains, and track task-space control objectives. However, for many applications, safety-critical controllers are important to…

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods have been proven successful in solving manipulation tasks autonomously. However, RL is still not widely adopted on real robotic systems because working with real hardware entails additional challenges,…

Legged robots have great potential to perform loco-manipulation tasks, yet it is challenging to keep the robot balanced while it interacts with the environment. In this paper we study the use of additional contact points for maximising the…

Many humanoid and multi-legged robots are controlled in positions rather than in torques, which prevents direct control of contact forces, and hampers their ability to create multiple contacts to enhance their balance, such as placing a…

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…