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Traditional one-step preview planning algorithms for bipedal locomotion struggle to generate viable gaits when walking across terrains with restricted footholds, such as stepping stones. To overcome such limitations, this paper introduces a…
Planning smooth and energy-efficient motions for wheeled mobile robots is a central task for applications ranging from autonomous driving to service and intralogistic robotics. Over the past decades, a wide variety of motion planners, steer…
Humanoid robots are increasingly demanded to operate in interactive and human-surrounded environments while achieving sophisticated locomotion and manipulation tasks. To accomplish these tasks, roboticists unremittingly seek for advanced…
Despite decades of study, many unknowns exist about the mechanisms governing human locomotion. Current models and motor control theories can only partially capture the phenomenon. This may be a major cause of the reduced efficacy of lower…
Reduced-order models (ROM) are popular in online motion planning due to their simplicity. A good ROM for control captures critical task-relevant aspects of the full dynamics while remaining low dimensional. However, planning within the…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
The motivation of our current research is to devise motion planners for legged locomotion that are able to exploit the robot's actuation capabilities. This means, when possible, to minimize joint torques or to propel as much as admissible…
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…
Automatically generating agile whole-body motions for legged and humanoid robots remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. While numerous trajectory optimization approaches have been proposed, there is no clear guideline on how the…
Intentionally applying impacts while maintaining balance is challenging for legged robots. This study originated from observing experimental data of the humanoid robot HRP-4 intentionally hitting a wall with its right arm while standing on…
Text-to-motion models excel at efficient human motion generation, but existing approaches lack fine-grained controllability over the generation process. Consequently, modifying subtle postures within a motion or inserting new actions at…
This paper proposes a modular framework to generate robust biped locomotion using a tight coupling between an analytical walking approach and deep reinforcement learning. This framework is composed of six main modules which are…
Design requirements for moving parts in mechanical assemblies are typically specified in terms of interactions with other parts. Some are purely kinematic (e.g., pairwise collision avoidance) while others depend on physics and material…
Quadruped robots are designed to achieve agile and robust locomotion by drawing inspiration from legged animals. However, most existing control methods for quadruped robots lack a key capacity observed in animals: the ability to exhibit…
Taking inspiration from the natural gait transition mechanism of quadrupeds, devising a good gait transition strategy is important for quadruped robots to achieve energy-efficient locomotion on various terrains and velocities. While…
Model predictive control (MPC) has shown great success for controlling complex systems such as legged robots. However, when closing the loop, the performance and feasibility of the finite horizon optimal control problem (OCP) solved at each…
This paper combines the fast Zero-Moment-Point (ZMP) approaches that work well in practice with the broader range of capabilities of a Trajectory Optimization formulation, by optimizing over body motion, footholds and Center of Pressure…
Biped robots are inherently unstable because of their complex kinematics as well as dynamics. Despite the many research efforts in developing biped locomotion, the performance of biped locomotion is still far from the expectations. This…
This paper presents a motion planning algorithm for quadruped locomotion based on density functions. We decompose the locomotion problem into a high-level density planner and a model predictive controller (MPC). Due to density functions…
The ability to solve motion-planning queries within a fixed time budget is critical for deploying robotic systems in time-sensitive applications. Semi-static environments, where most of the workspace remains fixed while a subset of…