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Legged robots need to make contact with irregular surfaces, when operating in unstructured natural terrains. Representing and perceiving these areas to reason about potential contact between a robot and its surrounding environment, is still…
Legged locomotion benefits from embodied sensing, where perception emerges from the physical interaction between body and environment. We present a soft-surfaced, vision-based tactile foot sensor that endows a bipedal robot with a skin-like…
This paper introduces the Terrain Recognition And Contact Force Estimation Paw, a compact and sensorized shoe designed for legged robots. The paw end-effector is made of silicon that deforms upon the application of contact forces, while an…
Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…
Traversing risky terrains with sparse footholds presents significant challenges for legged robots, requiring precise foot placement in safe areas. To acquire comprehensive exteroceptive information, prior studies have employed motion…
In this paper, an online adaptation algorithm for bipedal walking on uneven surfaces with height uncertainty is proposed. In order to generate walking patterns on flat terrains, the trajectories in the task space are planned to satisfy the…
Motivated by the astonishing capabilities of natural intelligent agents and inspired by theories from psychology, this paper explores the idea that perception gets coupled to 3D properties of the world via interaction with the environment.…
The quality of the visual feedback can vary significantly on a legged robot that is meant to traverse unknown and unstructured terrains. The map of the environment, acquired with online state-of-the-art algorithms, often degrades after a…
Region-based methods have become increasingly popular for model-based, monocular 3D tracking of texture-less objects in cluttered scenes. However, while they achieve state-of-the-art results, most methods are computationally expensive,…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
In this paper, we give a double twist to the problem of planning under uncertainty. State-of-the-art planners seek to minimize the localization uncertainty by only considering the geometric structure of the scene. In this paper, we argue…
The ability to perform locomotion in various terrains is critical for legged robots. However, the robot has to have a better understanding of the surface it is walking on to perform robust locomotion on different terrains. Animals and…
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…
The ability of bipedal robots to adapt to diverse and unstructured terrain conditions is crucial for their deployment in real-world environments. To this end, we present a novel, bio-inspired robot foot design with stabilizing tarsal…
Robotic mapping is attractive in many scientific applications that involve environmental surveys. This paper presents a system for localization and mapping of sparsely distributed surface features such as precariously balanced rocks (PBRs),…
Although haptic sensing has recently been used for legged robot localization in extreme environments where a camera or LiDAR might fail, the problem of efficiently representing the haptic signatures in a learned prior map is still open.…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking.…
Navigating cluttered environments is a challenging task for any mobile system. Existing approaches for ground-based mobile systems primarily focus on small wheeled robots, which face minimal constraints with overhanging obstacles and cannot…
To proactively navigate and traverse various terrains, active use of visual perception becomes indispensable. We aim to investigate the feasibility and performance of using sparse visual observations to achieve perceptual locomotion over a…
We propose a learning-based method to reconstruct the local terrain for locomotion with a mobile robot traversing urban environments. Using a stream of depth measurements from the onboard cameras and the robot's trajectory, the algorithm…