Related papers: Rigid vs compliant contact: An experimental study …
In biomechanics and robotics, elasticity plays a crucial role in enhancing locomotion efficiency and stability. Traditional approaches in legged robots often employ series elastic actuators (SEA) with discrete rigid components, which, while…
The human foot serves as the critical interface between the body and environment during locomotion. Existing musculoskeletal models typically oversimplify foot-ground contact mechanics, limiting their ability to accurately simulate human…
Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…
This manuscript presents a model of compliant contacts for time-critical humanoid robot motion control. The proposed model considers the environment as a continuum of spring-damper systems, which allows us to compute the equivalent contact…
Bipedal walking is one of the most important hallmarks of human that robots have been trying to mimic for many decades. Although previous control methodologies have achieved robot walking on some terrains, there is a need for a framework…
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…
The control of bipedal robotic walking remains a challenging problem in the domains of computation and experiment, due to the multi-body dynamics and various sources of uncertainty. In recent years, there has been a rising trend towards…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
A safety-critical measure of legged locomotion performance is a robot's ability to track its desired time-varying position trajectory in an environment, which is herein termed as "global-position tracking". This paper introduces a nonlinear…
Animals locomote robustly and agile, albeit significant sensorimotor delays of their nervous system. The sensorimotor control of legged robots is implemented with much higher frequencies-often in the kilohertz range-and sensor and actuator…
In this article, we propose a deep learning framework that provides a unified approach to the problem of leg contact detection in humanoid robot walking gaits. Our formulation accomplishes to accurately and robustly estimate the contact…
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…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Locomotion of legged machines faces the problems of model complexity and computational costs. Algorithms based on complex models and/or reinforcement learning exist to solve the walking control task. In this project, we aim to develop a…
We present a principled method for motion prediction via dynamic simulation for rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact region is a planar non-convex contact patch. Such methods are useful in planning and…
Multi-legged robots with six or more legs are not in common use, despite designs with superior stability, maneuverability, and a low number of actuators being available for over 20 years. This may be in part due to the difficulty in…
Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…
Humanoid robots are expected to operate in human-centered environments where safe and natural physical interaction is essential. However, most recent reinforcement learning (RL) policies emphasize rigid tracking and suppress external…
We present a new open-source torque-controlled legged robot system, with a low-cost and low-complexity actuator module at its core. It consists of a high-torque brushless DC motor and a low-gear-ratio transmission suitable for impedance and…
We present a principled method for motion prediction via dynamic simulation for rigid bodies in intermittent contact with each other where the contact is assumed to be a planar non-convex contact patch. The planar non-convex contact patch…