Related papers: Evolving Robots on Easy Mode: Towards a Variable C…
Legged robots can traverse challenging terrain, use perception to plan their safe foothold positions, and navigate the environment. Such unique mobility capabilities make these platforms a perfect candidate for scenarios such as search and…
Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…
Learning has propelled the cutting edge of performance in robotic control to new heights, allowing robots to operate with high performance in conditions that were previously unimaginable. The majority of the work, however, assumes that the…
Legged robots are physically capable of traversing a wide range of challenging environments, but designing controllers that are sufficiently robust to handle this diversity has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Reinforcement…
Evolutionary robot systems are usually affected by the properties of the environment indirectly through selection. In this paper, we present and investigate a system where the environment also has a direct effect: through regulation. We…
The design of gaits for robot locomotion can be a daunting process which requires significant expert knowledge and engineering. This process is even more challenging for robots that do not have an accurate physical model, such as compliant…
We focus on the problem of developing energy efficient controllers for quadrupedal robots. Animals can actively switch gaits at different speeds to lower their energy consumption. In this paper, we devise a hierarchical learning framework,…
Real-time constraint satisfaction for robots can be quite challenging due to the high computational complexity that arises when accounting for the system dynamics and environmental interactions, often requiring simplification in modelling…
If robots are to become ubiquitous, they will need to be able to adapt to complex and dynamic environments. Robots that can adapt their bodies while deployed might be flexible and robust enough to meet this challenge. Previous work on…
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…
A quadruped robot is a promising system that can offer assistance comparable to that of dog guides due to its similar form factor. However, various challenges remain in making these robots a reliable option for blind and low-vision (BLV)…
Learning robot tasks or controllers using deep reinforcement learning has been proven effective in simulations. Learning in simulation has several advantages. For example, one can fully control the simulated environment, including halting…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…
During learning trials, systems are exposed to different failure conditions which may break robotic parts before a safe behavior is discovered. Humans contour this problem by grounding their learning to a safer structure/control first and…
Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…
Learning multiple gaits is non-trivial for legged robots, especially when encountering different terrains and velocity commands. In this work, we present an end-to-end training framework for learning multiple gaits for quadruped robots,…
The remarkable athletic intelligence displayed by humans in complex dynamic movements such as dancing and gymnastics suggests that the balance mechanism in biological beings is decoupled from specific movement patterns. This decoupling…
This paper aims to develop distributed feedback control algorithms that allow cooperative locomotion of quadrupedal robots which are coupled to each other by holonomic constraints. These constraints can arise from collaborative manipulation…
Taking inspiration from the natural gait transition mechanism of quadrupeds, devising a good gait transition strategy is important for quadruped robots to achieve energy-efficient locomotion on various terrains and velocities. While…
Exposing an Evolutionary Algorithm that is used to evolve robot controllers to variable conditions is necessary to obtain solutions which are robust and can cross the reality gap. However, we do not yet have methods for analyzing and…