Related papers: Adaptive Tensegrity Locomotion on Rough Terrain vi…
Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid rods connected by elastic cables, have a number of unique properties that make them appealing for use as planetary exploration rovers. However, control of tensegrity robots remains a difficult problem…
Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid struts and elastic tendons, provide impact resistance, low mass, and adaptability to unstructured terrain. Their compliance and complex, coupled dynamics, however, present modeling and control…
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…
Tensegrity robots, which are composed of compressive elements (rods) and flexible tensile elements (e.g., cables), have a variety of advantages, including flexibility, low weight, and resistance to mechanical impact. Nevertheless, the…
Tensegrity robots are composed of rigid struts and flexible cables. They constitute an emerging class of hybrid rigid-soft robotic systems and are promising systems for a wide array of applications, ranging from locomotion to assembly. They…
Tensegrity robots combine rigid rods and elastic cables, offering high resilience and deployability but at the same time posing major challenges for locomotion control due to their underactuated and highly coupled dynamics. This paper…
Quadruped robots have shown remarkable mobility on various terrains through reinforcement learning. Yet, in the presence of sparse footholds and risky terrains such as stepping stones and balance beams, which require precise foot placement…
Living organisms intertwine soft (e.g., muscle) and hard (e.g., bones) materials, giving them an intrinsic flexibility and resiliency often lacking in conventional rigid robots. The emerging field of soft robotics seeks to harness these…
Conventional mobile tensegrity robots constructed with straight links offer mobility at the cost of locomotion speed. While spherical robots provide highly effective rolling behavior, they often lack the stability required for navigating…
This paper presents a new teleoperated spherical tensegrity robot capable of performing locomotion on steep inclined surfaces. With a novel control scheme centered around the simultaneous actuation of multiple cables, the robot demonstrates…
Legged robots are becoming increasingly powerful and popular in recent years for their potential to bring the mobility of autonomous agents to the next level. This work presents a deep reinforcement learning approach that learns a robust…
Tensegrity robots, composed of rigid rods and flexible cables, exhibit high strength-to-weight ratios and significant deformations, which enable them to navigate unstructured terrains and survive harsh impacts. They are hard to control,…
Future robots will navigate perilous, remote environments with resilience and autonomy. Researchers have proposed building robots with compliant bodies to enhance robustness, but this approach often sacrifices the autonomous capabilities…
Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…
Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…
Biomimicry has played a pivotal role in robotics. In contrast to rigid robots, bio-inspired robots exhibit an inherent compliance, facilitating versatile movements and operations in constrained spaces. The robot implementation in…
This paper addresses the challenge of terrain-adaptive dynamic locomotion in humanoid robots, a problem traditionally tackled by optimization-based methods or reinforcement learning (RL). Optimization-based methods, such as model-predictive…
Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…
Mobile soft robots offer compelling applications in fields ranging from urban search and rescue to planetary exploration. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that the nonlinear dynamics imposed by soft materials often result in…
Legged robots need to be capable of walking on diverse terrain conditions. In this paper, we present a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning locomotion on non-rigid dynamic terrains. Specifically, our framework can generate…