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Limbless organisms such as snakes can navigate nearly all terrain. In particular, desert-dwelling sidewinder rattlesnakes (Crotalus cerastes) operate effectively on inclined granular media (such as sand dunes) that induce failure in…
Robot navigation within complex environments requires precise state estimation and localization to ensure robust and safe operations. For ambulating mobile robots like robot snakes, traditional methods for sensing require multiple embedded…
Sprawling locomotion in vertebrates, particularly salamanders, demonstrates how body undulation and spinal mobility enhance stability, maneuverability, and adaptability across complex terrains. While prior work has separately explored…
In nature, legged animals have developed the ability to adapt to challenging terrains through perception, allowing them to plan safe body and foot trajectories in advance, which leads to safe and energy-efficient locomotion. Inspired by…
Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear…
We tackle the problem of perceptive locomotion in dynamic environments. In this problem, a quadrupedal robot must exhibit robust and agile walking behaviors in response to environmental clutter and moving obstacles. We present a…
We investigate the scenario that a robot needs to reach a designated goal after taking a sequence of appropriate actions in a non-static environment that is partially structured. One application example is to control a marine vehicle to…
This paper presents an online framework for synthesizing agile locomotion for bipedal robots that adapts to unknown environments, modeling errors, and external disturbances. To this end, we leverage step-to-step (S2S) dynamics which has…
Soft growing robots, are a type of robots that are designed to move and adapt to their environment in a similar way to how plants grow and move with potential applications where they could be used to navigate through tight spaces, dangerous…
Task space trajectory tracking for quadruped robots plays a crucial role on achieving dexterous maneuvers in unstructured environments. To fulfill the control objective, the robot should apply forces through the contact of the legs with the…
We study the navigation problem for a robot moving amidst static and dynamic obstacles and rely on a hierarchical approach to solve it. First, the reference trajectory is planned by the safe interval path planning algorithm that is capable…
Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…
Social navigation for bipedal robots remains relatively unexplored due to the highly complex, nonlinear dynamics of bipedal locomotion. This study presents a preliminary exploration of social navigation for bipedal robots in a human crowded…
Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…
Compensating for slip and skid is crucial for mobile robots navigating outdoor terrains. In these challenging environments, slipping and skidding introduce uncertainties into trajectory tracking systems, potentially compromising the safety…
Robotic exploration in extreme environments such as caves, oceans, and planetary surfaces pose significant challenges, particularly in locomotion across diverse terrains. Conventional wheeled or legged robots often struggle in these…
We study the parameterized complexity of a variant of the classic video game Snake that models real-world problems of motion planning. Given a snake-like robot with an initial position and a final position in an environment (modeled by a…
Precise trajectory tracking for legged robots can be challenging due to their high degrees of freedom, unmodeled nonlinear dynamics, or random disturbances from the environment. A commonly adopted solution to overcome these challenges is to…
We present a novel outdoor navigation algorithm to generate stable and efficient actions to navigate a robot to reach a goal. We use a multi-stage training pipeline and show that our approach produces policies that result in stable and…
Robot navigation requires an autonomy pipeline that is robust to environmental changes and effective in varying conditions. Teach and Repeat (T&R) navigation has shown high performance in autonomous repeated tasks under challenging…