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Identifying the physical properties of the surrounding environment is essential for robotic locomotion and navigation to deal with non-geometric hazards, such as slippery and deformable terrains. It would be of great benefit for robots to…
We study the problem of bipedal robot navigation in complex environments with uncertain and rough terrain. In particular, we consider a scenario in which the robot is expected to reach a desired goal location by traversing an environment…
Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such motions and interactions in the presence of imperfect and…
Accurately modeling local surface properties of objects is crucial to many robotic applications, from grasping to material recognition. Surface properties like friction are however difficult to estimate, as visual observation of the object…
Friction is ubiquitous in daily life, from nanoscale machines to large engineering components. By probing the intricate interplay between system parameters and frictional behavior, scientists seek to unveil the underlying mechanisms that…
Controlling Wheeled-legged robots is challenging especially on slippery surfaces due to their dependence on continuous ground contact. Unlike quadrupeds or bipeds, which can leverage multiple fixed contact points for recovery,…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…
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…
Traversability estimation in off-road terrains is an essential procedure for autonomous navigation. However, creating reliable labels for complex interactions between the robot and the surface is still a challenging problem in…
In this paper, the problem of road friction prediction from a fleet of connected vehicles is investigated. A framework is proposed to predict the road friction level using both historical friction data from the connected cars and data from…
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the…
Muddy terrains present significant challenges for terrestrial robots, as subtle changes in composition and water content can lead to large variations in substrate strength and force responses, causing the robot to slip or get stuck. This…
Mobile robots should be capable of planning cost-efficient paths for autonomous navigation. Typically, the terrain and robot properties are subject to variations. For instance, properties of the terrain such as friction may vary across…
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…
This paper introduces a new technique for learning probabilistic models of mass and friction distributions of unknown objects, and performing robust sliding actions by using the learned models. The proposed method is executed in two…
Humanoid robots can, in principle, use their legs to go almost anywhere. Developing controllers capable of traversing diverse terrains, however, remains a considerable challenge. Classical controllers are hard to generalize broadly while…
The performances of braking control systems for robotic platforms, e.g., assisted and autonomous vehicles, airplanes and drones, are deeply influenced by the road-tire friction experienced during the maneuver. Therefore, the availability of…
Machine learning (ML) plays a crucial role in assessing traversability for autonomous rover operations on deformable terrains but suffers from inevitable prediction errors. Especially for heterogeneous terrains where the geological features…
Legged robots must exhibit robust and agile locomotion across diverse, unstructured terrains, a challenge exacerbated under blind locomotion settings where terrain information is unavailable. This work introduces a hierarchical…
Algorithms for motion planning in unknown environments are generally limited in their ability to reason about the structure of the unobserved environment. As such, current methods generally navigate unknown environments by relying on…