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Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
Gaits and transitions are key components in legged locomotion. For legged robots, describing and reproducing gaits as well as transitions remain longstanding challenges. Reinforcement learning has become a powerful tool to formulate…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
Purpose of review: This paper reviews opportunities and challenges for decentralised control, change-detection, and learning in the context of resilient robot teams. Recent findings: Exogenous fault detection methods can provide a generic…
Walking controllers often require parametrization which must be tuned according to some cost function. To estimate these parameters, simulations can be performed which are cheap but do not fully represent reality. Real-robot experiments, on…
Quadruped robots have emerged as an evolving technology that currently leverages simulators to develop a robust controller capable of functioning in the real-world without the need for further training. However, since it is impossible to…
A deformable land-air robot is introduced with excellent driving and flying capabilities, offering a smooth switching mechanism between the two modes. An elaborate coupled dynamics model is established for the robot, including rotors,…
In this paper, we introduce a model of evolution and learning in robots that co-optimizes a distribution of latent design vectors (genotypes) and a mixture of control experts (neural modules), which are gated by the latent coordinates of…
The physical coupling between robots has the potential to improve the capabilities of multi-robot systems in challenging manufacturing processes. However, the path tracking accuracy of physically coupled robots is not studied adequately,…
This work explores the potential of using differentiable simulation for learning quadruped locomotion. Differentiable simulation promises fast convergence and stable training by computing low-variance first-order gradients using robot…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Living organisms rely on endogenous feedback mechanisms to maintain homeostasis in the presence of uncertainty and environmental fluctuations. An emerging challenge at the interface of control systems engineering and synthetic biology is…
Robots are increasingly integrated across industries, particularly in healthcare. However, many valuable applications for quadrupedal robots remain overlooked. This research explores the effectiveness of three reinforcement learning…
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…
The complexities in the dynamic model of the legged robots make it necessary to utilize model-free controllers in the task of trajectory tracking. In This paper, an adaptive transpose Jacobian approach is proposed to deal with the dynamic…
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…
In this paper, we propose an inverse-kinematics controller for a class of multi-robot systems in the scenario of sampled communication. The goal is to make a group of robots perform trajectory tracking in a coordinated way when the sampling…
Parallel-elastic joints can improve the efficiency and strength of robots by assisting the actuators with additional torques. For these benefits to be realized, a spring needs to be carefully designed. However, designing robots is an…
In this paper, we improve upon a method for optimal control of quadrupedal robots which utilizes a full-order model of the system. The original method utilizes offline nonlinear optimal control to synthesize a control scheme which…
Embodiment co-design aims to optimize a robot's morphology and control policy simultaneously. While prior work has demonstrated its potential for generating environment-adaptive robots, this field still faces persistent challenges in…