Related papers: Trajectory generation for multi-contact momentum-c…
Force modulation of robotic manipulators has been extensively studied for several decades. However, it is not yet commonly used in safety-critical applications due to a lack of accurate interaction contact modeling and weak performance…
Humanoid robots with behavioral autonomy have consistently been regarded as ideal collaborators in our daily lives and promising representations of embodied intelligence. Compared to fixed-based robotic arms, humanoid robots offer a larger…
Humans can balance very well during walking, even when perturbed. But it seems difficult to achieve robust walking for bipedal robots. Here we describe the simplest balance controller that leads to robust walking for a linear inverted…
Legged robot research is presently focused on bipedal or quadrupedal robots, despite capabilities to build robots with many more legs to potentially improve locomotion performance. This imbalance is not necessarily due to hardware…
Biped robots are inherently unstable because of their complex kinematics as well as dynamics. Despite the many research efforts in developing biped locomotion, the performance of biped locomotion is still far from the expectations. This…
This paper presents a trajectory generation method for contact-constrained robotic systems such as manipulators and legged robots. Contact-constrained systems are affected by the interaction forces between the robot and the environment. In…
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…
Robotic manipulation demands precise control over both contact forces and motion trajectories. While force control is essential for achieving compliant interaction and high-frequency adaptation, it is limited to operations in close…
Contact-rich problems, such as snake robot locomotion, offer unexplored yet rich opportunities for optimization-based trajectory and acyclic contact planning. So far, a substantial body of control research has focused on emulating snake…
Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…
A hierarchical control architecture is presented for energy-efficient control of legged robots subject to variety of linear/nonlinear inequality constraints such as Coulomb friction cones, switching unilateral contacts, actuator saturation…
This paper presents a novel approach using sensitivity analysis for generalizing Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) to systems characterized by implicit dynamics, such as those modelled via inverse dynamics and variational or implicit…
Realizing bipedal locomotion on humanoid robots with point feet is especially challenging due to their highly underactuated nature, high degrees of freedom, and hybrid dynamics resulting from impacts. With the goal of addressing this…
Hybrid locomotion, which combines multiple modalities of locomotion within a single robot, enables robots to carry out complex tasks in diverse environments. This paper presents a novel method for planning multi-modal locomotion…
To enable humanoid robots to work robustly in confined environments, multi-contact motion that makes contacts not only at extremities, such as hands and feet, but also at intermediate areas of the limbs, such as knees and elbows, is…
Endowing humanoid robots with the ability to perform highly dynamic motions akin to human-level acrobatics has been a long-standing challenge. Successfully performing these maneuvers requires close consideration of the underlying physics in…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
Humanoid robots are well suited for human habitats due to their morphological similarity, but developing controllers for them is a challenging task that involves multiple sub-problems, such as control, planning and perception. In this…
In this paper, we devise methods for the multi- objective control of humanoid robots, a.k.a. prioritized whole- body controllers, that achieve efficiency and robustness in the algorithmic computations. We use a form of whole-body…
This paper proposes a novel control framework for agile and robust bipedal locomotion, addressing model discrepancies between full-body and reduced-order models. Specifically, assumptions such as constant centroidal inertia have introduced…