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Legged robots are well-suited for broad exploration tasks in complex environments with yielding terrain. Understanding robotic foot-terrain interactions is critical for safe locomotion and walking efficiency for legged robots. This paper…
Multi-legged elongate robots hold promise for maneuvering through complex environments. Prior work has demonstrated that reliable locomotion can be achieved using open-loop body undulation and foot placement on rugose terrain. However,…
Mobile robots rely on maps to navigate through an environment. In the absence of any map, the robots must build the map online from partial observations as they move in the environment. Traditional methods build a map using only direct…
Autonomous locomotion for mobile ground robots in unstructured environments such as waypoint navigation or flipper control requires a sufficiently accurate prediction of the robot-terrain interaction. Heuristics like occupancy grids or…
A new 3D localization and mapping techinque with terrain inclination assistance is proposed in this paper to allow a robot to identify its location and build a global map in an outdoor environment. The Iterative Closest Points (ICP)…
Animals in nature combine multiple modalities, such as sight and feel, to perceive terrain and develop an understanding of how to walk on uneven terrain in a stable manner. Similarly, legged robots need to develop their ability to stably…
Precise perception of contact interactions is essential for fine-grained manipulation skills for robots. In this paper, we present the design of feedback skills for robots that must learn to stack complex-shaped objects on top of each other…
Many-legged elongated robots show promise for reliable mobility on rugged landscapes. However, most studies on these systems focus on planar motion planning without addressing rapid vertical motion. Despite their success on mild rugged…
The ability to efficiently and effectively explore planetary surfaces is currently limited by the capability of wheeled rovers to traverse challenging terrains, and by pre-programmed data acquisition plans with limited in-situ flexibility.…
This paper proposes a solution to the problem of smooth path planning for mobile robots in dynamic and unknown environments. A novel concept of Time-Warped Grid is introduced to predict the pose of obstacles in the environment and avoid…
To determine the 3D orientation and 3D location of objects in the surroundings of a camera mounted on a robot or mobile device, we developed two powerful algorithms in object detection and temporal tracking that are combined seamlessly for…
Ground texture based localization methods are potential prospects for low-cost, high-accuracy self-localization solutions for robots. These methods estimate the pose of a given query image, i.e. the current observation of the ground from a…
Humans have the remarkable ability to use held objects as tools to interact with their environment. For this to occur, humans internally estimate how hand movements affect the object's movement. We wish to endow robots with this capability.…
Although bipedal locomotion provides the ability to traverse unstructured environments, it requires careful planning and control to safely walk across without falling. This poses an integrated challenge for the robot to perceive, plan, and…
Reliable obstacle detection and classification in rough and unstructured terrain such as agricultural fields or orchards remains a challenging problem. These environments involve large variations in both geometry and appearance, challenging…
The purpose of this paper is to explore a new way of autonomous mapping. Current systems using perception techniques like LAZER or SONAR use probabilistic methods and have a drawback of allowing considerable uncertainty in the mapping…
Recent advancements in legged robot perceptive locomotion have shown promising progress. However, terrain-aware humanoid locomotion remains largely constrained to two paradigms: depth image-based end-to-end learning and elevation map-based…
Mobile ground robots operating on unstructured terrain must predict which areas of the environment they are able to pass in order to plan feasible paths. We address traversability estimation as a heightmap classification problem: we build a…
Whiskers provide a way to sense surfaces in the immediate environment without disturbing it. In this paper we present a method for using highly flexible, curved, passive whiskers mounted along a robot arm to gather sensory data as they…
Dynamic locomotion of legged robots is a critical yet challenging topic in expanding the operational range of mobile robots. It requires precise planning when possible footholds are sparse, robustness against uncertainties and disturbances,…