Related papers: Understanding Legged Crawling for Soft-Robotics
Robotics would gain by replicating the remarkable agility of arthropods in navigating complex environments. Here we consider the control of multi-legged systems which have 6 or more legs. Current multi-legged control strategies in robots…
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…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…
Locomotion is typically studied either in continuous media where bodies and legs experience forces generated by the flowing medium, or on solid substrates dominated by friction. In the former, centralized coordination is believed to…
Animals run robustly in diverse terrain. This locomotion robustness is puzzling because axon conduction velocity is limited to a few ten meters per second. If reflex loops deliver sensory information with significant delays, one would…
Soft robots, in contrast to their rigid counter parts, have infinite degrees of freedom that are coupled with their interaction with the environment. We consider the locomotion of an untethered robot, in the granular medium, comprised of…
Soft robotics is a thriving branch of robotics which takes inspiration from nature and uses affordable flexible materials to design adaptable non-rigid robots. However, their flexible behavior makes these robots hard to model, which is…
Legged robots constructed from soft materials are commonly claimed to demonstrate safer, more robust environmental interactions than their rigid counterparts. However, this motivating feature of soft robots requires more rigorous…
Robots often interact with the world via attached parts such as wheels, joints, or appendages. In many systems, these interactions, and the manner in which they lead to locomotion, can be understood using the machinery of geometric…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking.…
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Although their locomotion on flat surfaces using planar gaits is inherently stable, when snakes deform their body out of plane to traverse complex terrain, maintaining stability becomes a…
In this paper, we study integrated estimation and control of soft robots. A significant challenge in deploying closed loop controllers is reliable proprioception via integrated sensing in soft robots. Despite the considerable advances…
Legged robots carry an IMU, but the inertial solution drifts because consumer-grade IMUs are noisy. However, the feet create intermittent contacts with the environment that can be used to mitigate that drift. This report develops a sequence…
Orb-weaving spiders detect prey on a web using vibration sensors at leg joints. They often dynamically crouch their legs during prey sensing, likely an active sensing strategy. However, how leg crouching enhances sensing is poorly…
Quadrupedal animals employ diverse galloping strategies to optimize speed, stability, and energy efficiency. However, the biomechanical mechanisms that enable adaptive gait transitions during high-speed locomotion under load remain poorly…
Dynamics simulation with frictional contacts is important for a wide range of applications, from cloth simulation to object manipulation. Recent methods using smoothed lagged friction forces have enabled robust and differentiable simulation…
Soft robots are robotic systems made of deformable materials and exhibit unique flexibility that can be exploited for complex environments and tasks. However, their control problem has been considered a challenging subject because they are…
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…
In this theoretical study, we present an analytical framework to investigate the slithering motion of snakes on flat surfaces. While previous studies have predominantly relied on numerical methods to identify optimal locomotion kinematics,…