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Legged robots must adapt their gait to navigate unpredictable environments, a challenge that animals master with ease. However, most deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches to quadruped locomotion rely on a fixed gait, limiting…
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…
Arboreal environments challenge current robots but are deftly traversed by many familiar animal locomotors such as squirrels. We present a small, 450 g robot "Pinto" developed for tree-jumping, a behavior seen in squirrels but rarely in…
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…
Can a quadrupedal robot perform bipedal motions like humans? Although developing human-like behaviors is more often studied on costly bipedal robot platforms, we present a solution over a lightweight quadrupedal robot that unlocks the…
Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots over their wheeled counterparts on rough and uneven…
Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…
Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this work presents a new design and development of a tank-like robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs,…
Quadruped robots are becoming increasingly essential for various applications, including industrial inspection and catastrophe search and rescue. These scenarios require robots to possess enhanced agility and obstacle-navigation skills.…
Quadruped robots have made significant advances in locomotion, extending their capabilities from controlled environments to real-world applications. Beyond movement, recent work has explored loco-manipulation using the legs to perform tasks…
We propose a method that achieves near-optimal rates for smooth stochastic convex optimization and requires essentially no prior knowledge of problem parameters. This improves on prior work which requires knowing at least the initial…
This paper describes a novel amphibious robot, which adopts a dual-swing-legs propulsion mechanism, proposing a new locomotion mode. The robot is called FroBot, since its structure and locomotion are similar to frogs. Our inspiration comes…
The use of standard robotic platforms can accelerate research and lower the entry barrier for new research groups. There exist many affordable humanoid standard platforms in the lower size ranges of up to 60cm, but larger humanoid robots…
Snakes and their bio-inspired robot counterparts have demonstrated locomotion on a wide range of terrains. However, dynamic vertical climbing is one locomotion strategy that has received little attention in the existing snake robotics…
We present the design and experimental results of the first 1-DOF, hip-actuated bipedal robot. While passive dynamic walking is simple by nature, many existing bipeds inspired by this form of walking are complex in control, mechanical…
This paper presents design and control innovations of wearable robots that tackle two barriers to widespread adoption of powered exoskeletons, namely restriction of human movement and versatile control of wearable co-robot systems. First,…
This paper designs a new spherical robot structure capable of supporting high-speed motion at up to 10 m/s. Building upon a single-pendulum-driven spherical robot, the design incorporates a momentum wheel with an axis aligned with the…
While quadruped robots usually have good stability and load capacity, bipedal robots offer a higher level of flexibility / adaptability to different tasks and environments. A multi-modal legged robot can take the best of both worlds. In…
A distinctive feature of quadrupeds that is integral to their locomotion is the tail. Tails serve many purposes in biological systems including propulsion, counterbalance, and stabilization while walking, running, climbing, or jumping.…
For legged robots to match the athletic capabilities of humans and animals, they must not only produce robust periodic walking and running, but also seamlessly switch between nominal locomotion gaits and more specialized transient…