Related papers: Line Walking and Balancing for Legged Robots with …
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…
The human body demonstrates exceptional motor capabilities-such as standing steadily on one foot or performing a high kick with the leg raised over 1.5 meters-both requiring precise balance control. While recent research on humanoid control…
Real-world applications require light-weight, energy-efficient, fully autonomous robots. Yet, increasing autonomy is oftentimes synonymous with escalating computational requirements. It might thus be desirable to offload intensive…
Despite the potential benefits of collaborative robots, effective manipulation tasks with quadruped robots remain difficult to realize. In this paper, we propose a hierarchical control system that can handle real-world collaborative…
This paper presents a Non-Linear Model Predictive Controller for humanoid robot locomotion with online step adjustment capabilities. The proposed controller considers the Centroidal Dynamics of the system to compute the desired contact…
We introduce a real-time, constrained, nonlinear Model Predictive Control for the motion planning of legged robots. The proposed approach uses a constrained optimal control algorithm known as SLQ. We improve the efficiency of this algorithm…
Legged robots can outperform wheeled machines for most navigation tasks across unknown and rough terrains. For such tasks, visual feedback is a fundamental asset to provide robots with terrain-awareness. However, robust dynamic locomotion…
Thanks to recent advancements in accelerating non-linear model predictive control (NMPC), it is now feasible to deploy whole-body NMPC at real-time rates for humanoid robots. However, enforcing inequality constraints in real time for such…
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…
To address the operational challenges of in-pipe robots in large pipes of water distribution systems (WDS), in this research, a control algorithm is proposed for our previously designed robot [4]. Our size adaptable robot has an…
Controlling contact forces during interactions is critical for locomotion and manipulation tasks. While sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has succeeded in many contact-rich problems, current RL methods achieve forceful interactions…
Walking quadruped robots face challenges in positioning their feet and lifting their legs during gait cycles over uneven terrain. The robot Laika is under development as a quadruped with a flexible, actuated spine designed to assist with…
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…
This paper introduces a novel six-axis force/torque sensor tailored for compact and lightweight legged robots. Unlike traditional strain gauge-based sensors, the proposed non-contact design employs photocouplers, enhancing resistance to…
Hybrid systems theory has become a powerful approach for designing feedback controllers that achieve dynamically stable bipedal locomotion, both formally and in practice. This paper presents an analytical framework 1) to address…
Enforcing balance of multi-limbed robots in multiple non-coplanar unilateral contact settings is challenging when a subset of such contacts are also induced in motion tasks. The first contribution of this paper is in enhancing the…
This paper presents a gait controller for bipedal robots to achieve highly agile walking over various terrains given local slope and friction cone information. Without these considerations, untimely impacts can cause a robot to trip and…
The recent availability of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) legged robot platforms have opened up new opportunities in deploying legged systems into different scenarios. While the main advantage of legged robots is their ability to traverse…
This paper presents a 3-DOF hopping robot with a human-like lower-limb joint configuration and a flat foot, capable of performing dynamic and repetitive jumping motions. To achieve both high torque output and a large hollow shaft diameter…
The control of bipedal robotic walking remains a challenging problem in the domains of computation and experiment, due to the multi-body dynamics and various sources of uncertainty. In recent years, there has been a rising trend towards…