Related papers: A Versatile Co-Design Approach For Dynamic Legged …
In this paper, we present a hardware-control co-design approach that enables efficient and versatile roller skating on quadrupedal robots equipped with passive wheels. Passive-wheel skating reduces leg inertia and improves energy…
Designing aerial robots for specialized tasks, from perching to payload delivery, requires tailoring their aerodynamic shape to specific mission requirements. For tasks involving wide flight envelopes, the usual sequential process of first…
Recent advances in 3D printing and manufacturing of miniaturized robotic hardware and computing are paving the way to build inexpensive and disposable robots. This will have a large impact on several applications including scientific…
Generating dynamic jumping motions on legged robots remains a challenging control problem as the full flight phase and large landing impact are expected. Compared to quadrupedal robots or other multi-legged robots, bipedal robots place…
Planning for legged-wheeled machines is typically done using trajectory optimization because of many degrees of freedom, thus rendering legged-wheeled planners prone to falling prey to bad local minima. We present a combined sampling and…
In robotics, structural design and behavior optimization have long been considered separate processes, resulting in the development of systems with limited capabilities. Recently, co-design methods have gained popularity, where bi-level…
Designing robot morphologies and kinematics has traditionally relied on human intuition, with little systematic foundation. Motion-design co-optimization offers a promising path toward automation, but two major challenges remain: (i) the…
Our goal is to make robotics more accessible to casual users by reducing the domain knowledge required in designing and building robots. Towards this goal, we present an interactive computational design system that enables users to design…
Planning whole-body motions while taking into account the terrain conditions is a challenging problem for legged robots since the terrain model might produce many local minima. Our coupled planning method uses stochastic and…
Although robotic manipulators are used in an ever-growing range of applications, robot manufacturers typically follow a ``one-fits-all'' philosophy, employing identical manipulators in various settings. This often leads to suboptimal…
In this paper, we present an efficient Dynamic Programing framework for optimal planning and control of legged robots. First we formulate this problem as an optimal control problem for switched systems. Then we propose a multi--level…
This work investigates an application-driven co-design problem where the motion and motors of a six degrees of freedom robotic manipulator are optimized simultaneously, and the application is characterized by a set of tasks. Unlike the…
Co-designing a robot's morphology and control can ensure synergistic interactions between them, prevalent in biological organisms. However, co-design is a high-dimensional search problem. To make this search tractable, we need a systematic…
The performance of legged robots depends strongly on both mechanical design and control, motivating co-design approaches that jointly optimize these parameters. However, most existing co-design studies focus on optimizing link dimensions…
Dynamic jumping with legged robots poses a challenging problem in planning and control. Formulating the jump optimization to allow fast online execution is difficult; efficiently using this capability to generate long-horizon motion plans…
Replicating and surpassing the autonomy of natural organisms remains a long-standing goal in robotics. Yet most robotic systems have their structure, materials, and control designed separately, in sharp contrast to the co-evolution in…
Designing multi-agent robotic systems requires reasoning across tightly coupled decisions spanning heterogeneous domains, including robot design, fleet composition, and planning. Much effort has been devoted to isolated improvements in…
High-speed legged navigation in discrete and geometrically complex environments is a challenging task because of the high-degree-of-freedom dynamics and long-horizon, nonconvex nature of the optimization problem. In this work, we propose a…
Soft robots achieve functionality through tight coupling among geometry, material composition, and actuation. As a result, effective design optimization requires these three aspects to be considered jointly rather than in isolation. This…
This paper presents a planning pipeline framework for locomotion in rope-assisted robots climbing vertical surfaces. The proposed framework is formulated as a bi-level optimization scheme that addresses a mixed-integer problem: selecting…