Related papers: A Legged Soft Robot Platform for Dynamic Locomotio…
Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
We present a model-based framework for robot locomotion that achieves walking based on only 4.5 minutes (45,000 control steps) of data collected on a quadruped robot. To accurately model the robot's dynamics over a long horizon, we…
Robotic tails can enhance the stability and maneuverability of mobile robots, but current designs face a trade-off between the power of rigid systems and the safety of soft ones. Rigid tails generate large inertial effects but pose risks in…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
Enabling robots to walk and run on yielding terrain is increasingly vital to endeavors ranging from disaster response to extraterrestrial exploration. While dynamic legged locomotion on rigid ground is challenging enough, yielding terrain…
Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…
Legged robots constructed from soft materials are commonly claimed to demonstrate safer, more robust environmental interactions than their rigid counterparts. However, this motivating feature of soft robots requires more rigorous…
This letter considers control of a radially symmetric tripedal friction-driven robot. The robot features 3 servo motors mounted on a 3-D printed chassis 7 cm from the center of mass and separated 120 degrees. These motors drive limbs, which…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integrates the additional degrees of freedom introduced by the…
Gait generation for soft robots is challenging due to the nonlinear dynamics and high dimensional input spaces of soft actuators. Limitations in soft robotic control and perception force researchers to hand-craft open loop controllers for…
Quadrupedal robots have emerged as versatile agents capable of locomoting and manipulating in complex environments. Traditional designs typically rely on the robot's inherent body parts or incorporate top-mounted arms for manipulation…
In most macro-scale robotics systems , propulsion and controls are enabled through a physical tether or complex on-board electronics and batteries. A tether simplifies the design process but limits the range of motion of the robot, while…
Many soft robots struggle to produce dynamic motions with fast, large displacements. We develop a parallel 6 degree-of-freedom (DoF) Stewart-Gough mechanism using Handed Shearing Auxetic (HSA) actuators. By using soft actuators, we are able…
Soft robotic snakes made of compliant materials can continuously deform their bodies and, therefore, mimic the biological snakes' flexible and agile locomotion gaits better than their rigid-bodied counterparts. Without wheel support, to…
In lunar and planetary exploration, legged robots have attracted significant attention as an alternative to conventional wheeled robots, which struggle to traverse rough and uneven terrain. To enable locomotion over highly irregular and…
Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…
Impressive animal locomotion capabilities are mediated by the co-evolution of the skeletal morphology and muscular properties. Legged robot performance would also likely benefit from the co-optimization of actuators and leg morphology.…
Achieving effective locomotion on diverse terrestrial substrates can require subtle changes of limb kinematics. Biologically inspired legged robots (physical models of organisms) have shown impressive mobility on hard ground but suffer…