Related papers: Design of Extra Robotic Legs for Augmenting Human …
Bipedal humanoid robots must precisely coordinate balance, timing, and contact decisions when locomoting on constrained footholds such as stepping stones, beams, and planks -- even minor errors can lead to catastrophic failure. Classical…
Exoskeletons and orthoses are wearable mobile systems providing mechanical benefits to the users. Despite significant improvements in the last decades, the technology is not fully mature to be adopted for strenuous and non-programmed tasks.…
This work is on vision-based planning strategies for legged robots that separate locomotion planning into foothold selection and pose adaptation. Current pose adaptation strategies optimize the robot's body pose relative to given footholds.…
Compared to a single-robot workstation, a multi-robot system offers several advantages: 1) it expands the system's workspace, 2) improves task efficiency, and, more importantly, 3) enables robots to achieve significantly more complex and…
Automation of hydraulic material handling machinery is currently limited to semi-static pick-and-place cycles. Dynamic throwing motions which utilize the passive joints, can greatly improve time efficiency as well as increase the dumping…
We introduce PAPRLE (Plug-And-Play Robotic Limb Environment), a modular ecosystem that enables flexible placement and control of robotic limbs. With PAPRLE, a user can change the arrangement of the robotic limbs, and control them using a…
Synthesizing complex whole-body manipulation behaviors has fundamental challenges due to the rapidly growing combinatorics inherent to contact interaction planning. While model-based methods have shown promising results in solving…
Human-robot interaction will play an essential role in various industries and daily tasks, enabling robots to effectively collaborate with humans and reduce their physical workload. Most of the existing approaches for physical human-robot…
Loss of mobility or balance resulting from neural trauma is a critical consideration in public health. Robotic exoskeletons hold great potential for rehabilitation and assisted movement, yet optimal assist-as-needed (AAN) control remains…
Controller design for bipedal walking on dynamic rigid surfaces (DRSes), which are rigid surfaces moving in the inertial frame (e.g., ships and airplanes), remains largely uninvestigated. This paper introduces a hierarchical control…
We propose an online motion planner for legged robot locomotion with the primary objective of achieving energy efficiency. The conceptual idea is to leverage a placement set of footstep positions based on the robot's body position to…
Robust and energy-efficient bipedal locomotion in robotics is still a challenging topic. In order to address issues in this field, we can take inspiration from nature, by studying human locomotion. The Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)…
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…
Robotic exoskeletons can enhance human strength and aid people with physical disabilities. However, designing them to ensure safety and optimal performance presents significant challenges. Developing exoskeletons should incorporate specific…
Environments with large terrain height variations present great challenges for legged robot locomotion. Drawing inspiration from fire ants' collective assembly behavior, we study strategies that can enable two ``connectable'' robots to…
We propose a mechanically simple and cheap design for a series elastic actuator with controllable stiffness. Such characteristics are necessary for animals for running, jumping, throwing, and manipulation, yet in robots, variable stiffness…
This paper describes the design and control of a support and recovery system for use with planar legged robots. The system operates in three modes. First, it can be operated in a fully transparent mode where no forces are applied to the…
We propose a novel reinforcement learning (RL) design to optimize the charging strategy for autonomous mobile robots in large-scale block stacking warehouses. RL design involves a wide array of choices that can mostly only be evaluated…
Pneunets are the primary form of soft robotic grippers. A key limitation to their wider adoption is their inability to grasp larger payloads due to objects slipping out of grasps. We have overcome this limitation by introducing a…
Humanoid perceptive locomotion has made significant progress and shows great promise, yet achieving robust multi-directional locomotion on complex terrains remains underexplored. To tackle this challenge, we propose RPL, a two-stage…