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Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…
Miniature locomotion robots with the ability to navigate confined environments show great promise for a wide range of tasks, including search and rescue operations. Soft miniature locomotion robots, as a burgeoning field, have attracted…
Inverse dynamics is used extensively in robotics and biomechanics applications. In manipulator and legged robots, it can form the basis of an effective nonlinear control strategy by providing a robot with both accurate positional tracking…
In this paper, we will report our efforts in designing closed-loop feedback for the thruster-assisted walking of bipedal robots. We will assume for well-tuned supervisory controllers and will focus on fine-tuning the joints desired…
Soft robots have drawn significant attention recently for their ability to achieve rich shapes when interacting with complex environments. However, their elasticity and flexibility compared to rigid robots also pose significant challenges…
Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…
Legged locomotion is commonly studied and expressed as a discrete set of gait patterns, like walk, trot, gallop, which are usually treated as given and pre-programmed in legged robots for efficient locomotion at different speeds. However,…
Learning-based approaches have recently shown notable success in legged locomotion. However, these approaches often lack accountability, necessitating empirical tests to determine their effectiveness. In this work, we are interested in…
High-speed locomotion of animals gives them tremendous advantages in exploring, hunting, and escaping from predators in varying environments. Enlightened by the fast-running gait of mammals like cheetahs and wolves, we designed and…
Inspired by spiking neural feedback, we propose a spiking controller for efficient locomotion in a soft robotic crawler. Its bistability, akin to neural fast positive feedback, combined with a sensorimotor slow negative feedback loop,…
Trajectory optimization with contact-rich behaviors has recently gained attention for generating diverse locomotion behaviors without pre-specified ground contact sequences. However, these approaches rely on precise models of robot dynamics…
We study the possibility of efficient intermittent locomotion for two-link bodies that slide by changing their interlink angle periodically in time. We find that the anisotropy ratio of the sliding friction coefficients is a key parameter,…
Many robotic systems locomote using gaits - periodic changes of internal shape, whose mechanical interaction with the robot's environment generate characteristic net displacements. Prominent examples with two shape variables are the low…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
We present experimental and numerical results for a model crawler which is able to extract net positional changes from reciprocal shape changes, i.e. 'breathing-like' deformations, thanks to directional, frictional interactions with a…
Legged robots have demonstrated remarkable agility on rigid, stationary ground, but their locomotion reliability remains limited in non-inertial environments, where the supporting ground moves, tilts, or accelerates. Such conditions arise…
This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for modeling an on-orbit assembly mission scenario of a large flexible structure using a multi-arm robot. This methodology accounts for significant changes in inertia and flexibility…
Dynamic walking on bipedal robots has evolved from an idea in science fiction to a practical reality. This is due to continued progress in three key areas: a mathematical understanding of locomotion, the computational ability to encode this…
Brachiation is a dynamic, coordinated swinging maneuver of body and arms used by monkeys and apes to move between branches. As a unique underactuated mode of locomotion, it is interesting to study from a robotics perspective since it can…
In this work, we provide a simulation framework to perform systematic studies on the effects of spinal joint compliance and actuation on bounding performance of a 16-DOF quadruped spined robot Stoch 2. Fast quadrupedal locomotion with…