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Contact estimation is a key ability for limbed robots, where making and breaking contacts has a direct impact on state estimation and balance control. Existing approaches typically rely on gate-cycle priors or designated contact sensors. We…
For intelligent robots to interact in meaningful ways with their environment, they must understand both the geometric and semantic properties of the scene surrounding them. The majority of research to date has addressed these mapping…
In this work, we bridge the gap between recent pose estimation and tracking work to develop a powerful method for robots to track objects in their surroundings. Motion-Nets use a segmentation model to segment the scene, and separate…
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…
Accurate and robust global localization is essential to robotics applications. We propose a novel global localization method that employs the map traversability as a hidden observation. The resulting map-corrected odometry localization is…
Studying the manipulation of deformable linear objects has significant practical applications in industry, including car manufacturing, textile production, and electronics automation. However, deformable linear object manipulation poses a…
Safe path and gait planning are essential for bipedal robots to navigate complex real-world environments. The prevailing approaches often plan the path and gait separately in a hierarchical fashion, potentially resulting in unsafe movements…
Legged robots face significant challenges in navigating complex environments, as they require precise real-time decisions for foothold selection and contact planning. While existing research has explored methods to select footholds based on…
In this paper, we address the shape formation problem for massive robot swarms in environments where external localization systems are unavailable. Achieving this task effectively with solely onboard measurements is still scarcely explored…
We propose a method to generate actuation plans for a reduced order, dynamic model of bipedal running. This method explicitly enforces robustness to ground uncertainty. The plan generated is not a fixed body trajectory that is aggressively…
Bipedal running is a difficult task to realize in robots, since the trunk is underactuated and control is limited by intermittent ground contacts. Stabilizing the trunk becomes even more challenging if the terrain is uneven and causes…
Mobile ground robots operating on unstructured terrain must predict which areas of the environment they are able to pass in order to plan feasible paths. We address traversability estimation as a heightmap classification problem: we build a…
Although wheeled robots have been predominant for planetary exploration, their geometry limits their capabilities when traveling over steep slopes, through rocky terrains, and in microgravity. Legged robots equipped with grippers are a…
Accurate localization is an essential technology for the flexible navigation of robots in large-scale environments. Both SLAM-based and map-based localization will increase the computing load due to the increase in map size, which will…
In this work, we demonstrate robust walking in the bipedal robot Digit on uneven terrains by just learning a single linear policy. In particular, we propose a new control pipeline, wherein the high-level trajectory modulator shapes the…
In the era of autonomous driving, urban mapping represents a core step to let vehicles interact with the urban context. Successful mapping algorithms have been proposed in the last decade building the map leveraging on data from a single…
Legged robots can traverse challenging terrain, use perception to plan their safe foothold positions, and navigate the environment. Such unique mobility capabilities make these platforms a perfect candidate for scenarios such as search and…
This paper introduces an efficient procedure to localize user-defined points on the surface of deformable objects and track their positions in 3D space over time. To cope with a deformable object's infinite number of DOF, we propose a…
Global localisation from visual data is a challenging problem applicable to many robotics domains. Prior works have shown that neural networks can be trained to map images of an environment to absolute camera pose within that environment,…
The motion of robots and objects in our world is often highly dependent upon contact. When contact is expected but does not occur or when contact is not expected but does occur, robot behavior diverges from plan, often disastrously. This…