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Stabilizing legged robot locomotion on a dynamic rigid surface (DRS) (i.e., rigid surface that moves in the inertial frame) is a complex planning and control problem. The complexity arises due to the hybrid nonlinear walking dynamics…
In recent years, the numbers of life-size humanoids as well as their mobile capabilities have steadily grown. Stable walking motion and control for humanoid robots are active fields of research. In this scenario an open question is how to…
Little research into tactile feet has been done for walking robots despite the benefits such feedback could give when walking on uneven terrain. This paper describes the development of a simple, robust and inexpensive tactile foot for…
The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing…
Humanoid robots offer significant advantages for search and rescue tasks, thanks to their capability to traverse rough terrains and perform transportation tasks. In this study, we present a task and motion planning framework for search and…
Millirobots are a promising robotic platform for many applications due to their small size and low manufacturing costs. Legged millirobots, in particular, can provide increased mobility in complex environments and improved scaling of…
The quality of the visual feedback can vary significantly on a legged robot that is meant to traverse unknown and unstructured terrains. The map of the environment, acquired with online state-of-the-art algorithms, often degrades after a…
To determine the 3D orientation and 3D location of objects in the surroundings of a camera mounted on a robot or mobile device, we developed two powerful algorithms in object detection and temporal tracking that are combined seamlessly for…
Humanoid robots maintain balance and navigate by controlling the contact wrenches applied to the environment. While it is possible to plan dynamically-feasible motion that applies appropriate wrenches using existing methods, a humanoid may…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) represent a new frontier in a wide range of monitoring and research applications. To fully leverage their potential, a key challenge is planning missions for efficient data acquisition in complex…
Legged robots have achieved impressive feats in dynamic locomotion in challenging unstructured terrain. However, in entertainment applications, the design and control of these robots face additional challenges in appealing to human…
Location-aware applications play an increasingly critical role in everyday life. However, satellite-based localization (e.g., GPS) has limited accuracy and can be unusable in dense urban areas and indoors. We introduce an image-based global…
Safe navigation in uneven terrains is an important problem in robotic research. In this paper we propose a 2.5D navigation system which consists of elevation map building, path planning and local path following with obstacle avoidance. For…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) based controllers for legged robots have demonstrated impressive robustness for walking in different environments for several robot platforms. To enable the application of RL policies for humanoid robots in…
Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…
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…
In a world designed for legs, quadrupeds, bipeds, and humanoids have the opportunity to impact emerging robotics applications from logistics, to agriculture, to home assistance. The goal of this survey is to cover the recent progress toward…
Estimating the state of a deformable object is crucial for robotic manipulation, yet accurate tracking is challenging when the object is partially-occluded. To address this problem, we propose an occlusion-robust RGBD sequence tracking…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Panoptic tracking enables pixel-level scene interpretation of videos by integrating instance tracking in panoptic segmentation. This provides robots with a spatio-temporal understanding of the environment, an essential attribute for their…