Related papers: How to run on rough terrains

If we give a robot the task of moving an object from its current position to another location in an unknown environment, the robot must explore the map, identify all types of obstacles, and then determine the best route to complete the…

Platooning of connected and automated vehicles provides significant benefits in terms of energy efficiency, traffic throughput, and, most critically, safety. These safety benefits depend on string stability, which dictates how disturbances…

Recurrent neural network-based reinforcement learning systems are capable of complex motor control tasks such as locomotion and manipulation, however, much of their underlying mechanisms still remain difficult to interpret. Our aim is to…

Snake robots have the potential to maneuver through tightly packed and complex environments. One challenge in enabling them to do so is the complexity in determining how to coordinate their many degrees-of-freedom to create purposeful…

Motion planners for mobile robots in unknown environments face the challenge of simultaneously maintaining both robustness against unmodeled uncertainties and persistent feasibility of the trajectory-finding problem. That is, while dealing…

Drops on a vibrating substrate can experience a variety of motion regimes, including directional motion and climbing. The key ingredient to elicit these regimes is simultaneously activating the in-plane and out-of-plane degrees of freedom…

Navigation up a sensory gradient is one of the simplest behaviours, and the simplest strategy is run and tumble. But some organisms use other strategies, such as reversing direction or turning by some angle. Here we ask what drives the…

Jumping take-off in birds is an explosive behaviour with the goal of providing a rapid transition from ground to airborne locomotion. An effective jump is predicated on the need to maintain dynamic stability through the acceleration phase.…

This paper presents four types of tracking control systems for the attitude dynamics of a rigid body. First, a smooth control system is constructed to track a given desired attitude trajectory, while guaranteeing almost semi-global…

Legged robot locomotion requires the planning of stable reference trajectories, especially while traversing uneven terrain. The proposed trajectory optimization framework is capable of generating dynamically stable base and footstep…

Bipedal robots have advantages in maneuvering human-centered environments, but face greater failure risk compared to other stable mobile platforms such as wheeled or quadrupedal robots. While learning-based traversability has been widely…

In this paper, we consider a general task of jumping varying distances and heights for a quadrupedal robot in noisy environments, such as off of uneven terrain and with variable robot dynamics parameters. To accurately jump in such…

The complex physics and numerous failure modes of structural impact creates challenges when designing for impact resistance. While simple geometries of layered material are conventional, advances in 3D printing and additive manufacturing…

We study a simple run-and-tumble random walk whose switching frequency from run mode to tumble mode and the reverse depend on a stochastic signal. We consider a particularly sharp, step-like dependence, where the run to tumble switching…

The idea of adaptive walks on fitness landscapes as a means of studying evolutionary processes on large time scales is extended to fitness landscapes that are slowly changing over time. The influence of ruggedness and of the amount of…

We present a method that uses high-resolution topography data of rough terrain, and ground vehicle simulation, to predict traversability. Traversability is expressed as three independent measures: the ability to traverse the terrain at a…

We study the stochastic dynamics of a particle with two distinct motility states. Each one is characterized by two parameters: one represents the average speed and the other represents the persistence quantifying the tendency to maintain…

In this work, we demonstrate robust walking in the bipedal robot Digit on uneven terrains by just learning a single linear policy. In particular, we propose a new control pipeline, wherein the high-level trajectory modulator shapes the…

In this paper, we study dynamic stability during running, focusing on the effects of speed and the use of a leg prosthesis. We compute and compare the maximal Lyapunov exponents of kinematic time-series data from subjects with and without…

Interfaces in tissues are ubiquitous, both between tissue and environment as well as between populations of different cell types. The propagation of an interface can be driven mechanically. % e.g. by a difference in the respective…