Related papers: How to run on rough terrains
We propose a method to generate actuation plans for a reduced order, dynamic model of bipedal running. This method explicitly enforces robustness to ground uncertainty. The plan generated is not a fixed body trajectory that is aggressively…
Many organisms navigate gradients by alternating straight motions (runs) with random reorientations (tumbles), transiently suppressing tumbles whenever attractant signal increases. This induces a functional coupling between movement and…
Terrain geometry is, in general, non-smooth, non-linear, non-convex, and, if perceived through a robot-centric visual unit, appears partially occluded and noisy. This work presents the complete control pipeline capable of handling the…
Autonomous navigation of ground robots on uneven terrain is being considered in more and more tasks. However, uneven terrain will bring two problems to motion planning: how to assess the traversability of the terrain and how to cope with…
Humans experience small fluctuations in their gait when walking on uneven terrain. The fluctuations deviate from the steady, energy-minimizing pattern for level walking, and have no obvious organization. But humans often look ahead when…
Humans excel at robust bipedal walking in complex natural environments. In each step, they adequately tune the interaction of biomechanical muscle dynamics and neuronal signals to be robust against uncertainties in ground conditions.…
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Although their locomotion on flat surfaces using planar gaits is inherently stable, when snakes deform their body out of plane to traverse complex terrain, maintaining stability becomes a…
Navigating mobile robots through environments shared with humans is challenging. From the perspective of the robot, humans are dynamic obstacles that must be avoided. These obstacles make the collision-free space nonconvex, which leads to…
Achieving robust legged locomotion on complex terrains poses challenges due to the high uncertainty in robot-environment interactions. Recent advances in bipedal and quadrupedal robots demonstrate good mobility on rugged terrains but rely…
Robot feet are crucial for maintaining dynamic stability and propelling the body during walking, especially on uneven terrains. Traditionally, robot feet were mostly designed as flat and stiff pieces of metal, which meets its limitations…
Hopping robots often lose balance on slopes because the tilted ground creates unwanted rotation at landing. This work analyzes that effect using a simple spring mass model and identifies how slope induced impulses destabilize the robot. To…
Trajectory optimization with contact-rich behaviors has recently gained attention for generating diverse locomotion behaviors without pre-specified ground contact sequences. However, these approaches rely on precise models of robot dynamics…
Enabling robots to walk and run on yielding terrain is increasingly vital to endeavors ranging from disaster response to extraterrestrial exploration. While dynamic legged locomotion on rigid ground is challenging enough, yielding terrain…
Uncertainty-aware robot motion prediction is crucial for downstream traversability estimation and safe autonomous navigation in unstructured, off-road environments, where terrain is heterogeneous and perceptual uncertainty is high. Most…
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…
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…
A key challenge in off-road navigation is that even visually similar terrains or ones from the same semantic class may have substantially different traction properties. Existing work typically assumes no wheel slip or uses the expected…
Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…
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…
When walking on loose terrains, possibly covered with vegetation, the ground and grass should deform, but the character's gait should also change accordingly. We propose a method for modeling such two-ways interactions in real-time. We…