Related papers: Rigid vs compliant contact: An experimental study …

Generating robust locomotion for a humanoid robot in the presence of disturbances is difficult because of its high number of degrees of freedom and its unstable nature. In this paper, we used the concept of Divergent Component of…

Robust and energy-efficient bipedal locomotion in robotics is still a challenging topic. In order to address issues in this field, we can take inspiration from nature, by studying human locomotion. The Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)…

An effective paradigm for simulating the dynamics of robots that locomote and manipulate is multi-rigid body simulation with rigid contact. This paradigm provides reasonable tradeoffs between accuracy, running time, and simplicity of…

Contact planning is crucial in locomoting systems.Specifically, appropriate contact planning can enable versatile behaviors (e.g., sidewinding in limbless locomotors) and facilitate speed-dependent gait transitions (e.g., walk-trot-gallop…

Many methods exist for a bipedal robot to keep its balance while walking. In addition to step size and timing, other strategies are possible that influence the stability of the robot without interfering with the target direction and speed…

This paper comprehensively surveys research trends in imitation learning for contact-rich robotic tasks. Contact-rich tasks, which require complex physical interactions with the environment, represent a central challenge in robotics due to…

Wheeled-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheeled robots when driving on suitably flat surfaces and versatility of legged robots when stepping over or around obstacles. This paper introduces a planning and control framework to realise…

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…

With the increasing use of assistive robots in rehabilitation and assisted mobility of human patients, there has been a need for a deeper understanding of human-robot interactions particularly through simulations, allowing an understanding…

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…

The design of feedback controllers for bipedal robots is challenging due to the hybrid nature of its dynamics and the complexity imposed by high-dimensional bipedal models. In this paper, we present a novel approach for the design of…

Locomotion on dynamic rigid surface (i.e., rigid surface accelerating in an inertial frame) presents complex challenges for controller design, which are essential for deploying humanoid robots in dynamic real-world environments such as…

The paper presents a planner to generate walking trajectories by using the centroidal dynamics and the full kinematics of a humanoid robot. The interaction between the robot and the walking surface is modeled explicitly via new conditions,…

A significant barrier preventing model-based methods from achieving real-time and versatile dexterous robotic manipulation is the inherent complexity of multi-contact dynamics. Traditionally formulated as complementarity models,…

This paper presents a novel model-free reinforcement learning (RL) framework to design feedback control policies for 3D bipedal walking. Existing RL algorithms are often trained in an end-to-end manner or rely on prior knowledge of some…

Low-dimensional models are ubiquitous in the bipedal robotics literature. On the one hand is the community of researchers that bases feedback control design on pendulum models selected to capture the center of mass dynamics of the robot…

Much current study of legged locomotion has rightly focused on foot traction forces, including on granular media. Future legged millirobots will need to go through terrain, such as brush or other vegetation, where the body contact forces…

Underactuation is ubiquitous in human locomotion and should be ubiquitous in bipedal robotic locomotion as well. This chapter presents a coherent theory for the design of feedback controllers that achieve stable walking gaits in…

Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…

Designing robots capable of traversing uneven terrain and overcoming physical obstacles has been a longstanding challenge in the field of robotics. Walking robots show promise in this regard due to their agility, redundant DOFs and…