Related papers: The Problem of Adhesion Methods and Locomotion Mec…
The ability to recover from an unexpected external perturbation is a fundamental motor skill in bipedal locomotion. An effective response includes the ability to not just recover balance and maintain stability but also to fall in a safe…
In recent years, advancements in hardware have enabled quadruped robots to operate with high power and speed, while robust locomotion control using reinforcement learning (RL) has also been realized. As a result, expectations are rising for…
Microscopic robots could perform tasks with high spatial precision, such as acting in biological tissues on the scale of individual cells, provided they can reach precise locations. This paper evaluates the feasibility of in vivo locomotion…
While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology. Existing work has typically been tailored for particular environments or representations.…
Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding…
Modern climbing robots have risen to great heights, but mechanisms meant to scale cliffs often locomote slowly and over-cautiously on level ground. Here we introduce T-RHex, an iteration on the classic cockroach-inspired hexapod that has…
Continuum robots (CRs), owing to their compact structure, inherent compliance, and flexible deformation, have been widely applied in various fields. By coordinating multiple CRs to form collaborative continuum robots (CCRs), task…
Grip, walk, crawl, and jump. Soft robots are integrated functional structures composed of compliant mechanisms, whose activity spans various industrial applications such as surgery, healthcare, surveillance, and even planetary exploration.…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in legged locomotion over various challenging environments. However, due to the sim-to-real gap and lack of explainability, unconstrained RL policies deployed in the real…
Bipedal robots are a fascinating and advanced category of robots designed to mimic human form and locomotion. The development of the bipedal robots is a significant milestone in robotics. However, even the most advanced bipedal robots are…
Soft robots have the ability to adapt to their environment, which makes them suitable for use in disaster areas and agricultural fields, where their mobility is constrained by complex terrain. One of the main challenges in developing soft…
Despite recent remarkable achievements in quadruped control, it remains challenging to ensure robust and compliant locomotion in the presence of unforeseen external disturbances. Existing methods prioritize locomotion robustness over…
Quadrupedal robots resemble the physical ability of legged animals to walk through unstructured terrains. However, designing a controller for quadrupedal robots poses a significant challenge due to their functional complexity and requires…
Building intelligent autonomous systems at any scale is challenging. The sensing and computation constraints of a microrobot platform make the problems harder. We present improvements to learning-based methods for on-board learning of…
Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…
Recent progress in legged locomotion has allowed highly dynamic and parkour-like behaviors for robots, similar to their biological counterparts. Yet, these methods mostly rely on egocentric (first-person) perception, limiting their…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Animals have remarkable abilities to adapt locomotion to different terrains and tasks. However, robots trained by means of reinforcement learning are typically able to solve only a single task and a transferred policy is usually inferior to…
Multi-legged robots with six or more legs are not in common use, despite designs with superior stability, maneuverability, and a low number of actuators being available for over 20 years. This may be in part due to the difficulty in…
Automatic fall recovery is a crucial prerequisite before humanoid robots can be reliably deployed. Hand-designing controllers for getting up is difficult because of the varied configurations a humanoid can end up in after a fall and the…