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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…
Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured,…
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
Biomimetic intelligence and robotics are transforming field ecology by enabling lifelike robotic surrogates that interact naturally with animals under real world conditions. Studying avian behavior in the wild remains challenging due to the…
Environments with large terrain height variations present great challenges for legged robot locomotion. Drawing inspiration from fire ants' collective assembly behavior, we study strategies that can enable two ``connectable'' robots to…
Evolutionary algorithms offer great promise for the automatic design of robot bodies, tailoring them to specific environments or tasks. Most research is done on simplified models or virtual robots in physics simulators, which do not capture…
The automatic design of embodied agents (e.g. robots) has existed for 31 years and is experiencing a renaissance of interest in the literature. To date however, the field has remained narrowly focused on two kinds of anatomically simple…
Quadruped animals seamlessly transition between gaits as they change locomotion speeds. While the most widely accepted explanation for gait transitions is energy efficiency, there is no clear consensus on the determining factor, nor on the…
Legged robots have shown remarkable advantages in navigating uneven terrain. However, realizing effective locomotion and manipulation tasks on quadruped robots is still challenging. In addition, object and terrain parameters are generally…
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…
Celestial bodies such as the Moon and Mars are mainly covered by loose, granular soil, a notoriously challenging terrain to traverse with (wheeled) robotic systems. Here, we present experimental work on traversing steep, granular slopes…
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…
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.…
Wheeled bipedal robots have garnered increasing attention in exploration and inspection. However, most research simplifies calculations by ignoring leg dynamics, thereby restricting the robot's full motion potential. Additionally, robots…
Legged robots face significant challenges in moving and navigating on deformable and highly yielding terrain such as mud. We present a resistive force model for legged foot-mud interactions. The model captures rheological behaviors such as…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This paper presents a deformable…
We focus on push-based multi-object rearrangement planning using a nonholonomically constrained mobile robot. The simultaneous geometric, kinematic, and physics constraints make this problem especially challenging. Prior work on…
Almost all robotic systems in use have hard shells, which is limiting in many ways their full potential of physical interaction with humans or their surrounding environment. Robots with soft-shell covers offer an alternative morphology…
In swarm robotics, just as for an animal swarm in Nature, one of the aims is to reach and maintain a desired configuration. One of the possibilities for the team, to reach this aim, is to see what its neighbours are doing. This approach…
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…