Related papers: A Versatile Co-Design Approach For Dynamic Legged …

As legged robots are deployed in industrial and autonomous construction tasks requiring collaborative manipulation, they must handle object manipulation while maintaining stable locomotion. The challenge intensifies in real-world…

One major recurring challenge in deploying manipulation robots is determining the optimal placement of manipulators to maximize performance. This challenge is exacerbated in complex, cluttered agricultural environments of high-value crops,…

Many robotics applications, from object manipulation to locomotion, require planning methods that are capable of handling the dynamics of contact. Trajectory optimization has been shown to be a viable approach that can be made to support…

In multi-robot systems, achieving coordinated missions remains a significant challenge due to the coupled nature of coordination behaviors and the lack of global information for individual robots. To mitigate these challenges, this paper…

Robot design optimization, imitation learning and system identification share a common problem which requires optimization over robot or task parameters at the same time as optimizing the robot motion. To solve these problems, we can use…

Autonomous driving has a natural bi-level structure. The goal of the upper behavioural layer is to provide appropriate lane change, speeding up, and braking decisions to optimize a given driving task. However, this layer can only indirectly…

Recent advancements in soft actuators have enabled soft continuum swimming robots to achieve higher efficiency and more closely mimic the behaviors of real marine animals. However, optimizing the design and control of these soft continuum…

Convex optimization is crucial in controlling legged robots, where stability and optimal control are vital. Many control problems can be formulated as convex optimization problems, with a convex cost function and constraints capturing…

Co-designing autonomous robotic agents involves simultaneously optimizing the controller and physical design of the agent. Its inherent bi-level optimization formulation necessitates an outer loop design optimization driven by an inner loop…

Many problems in modern robotics can be addressed by modeling them as bilevel optimization problems. In this work, we leverage augmented Lagrangian methods and recent advances in automatic differentiation to develop a general-purpose…

Multi-level evolution is a bottom-up robotic design paradigm which decomposes the design problem into layered sub-tasks that involve concurrent search for appropriate materials, component geometry and overall morphology. Each of the three…

The design and control of winged aircraft and drones is an iterative process aimed at identifying a compromise of mission-specific costs and constraints. When agility is required, shape-shifting (morphing) drones represent an efficient…

Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…

As legged robots take on roles in industrial and autonomous construction, collaborative loco-manipulation is crucial for handling large and heavy objects that exceed the capabilities of a single robot. However, ensuring the safety of these…

This paper studies jumping for wheeled-bipedal robots, a motion that takes full advantage of the benefits from the hybrid wheeled and legged design features. A comprehensive hierarchical scheme for motion planning and control of jumping…

Quadruped robots are becoming increasingly essential for various applications, including industrial inspection and catastrophe search and rescue. These scenarios require robots to possess enhanced agility and obstacle-navigation skills.…

Generating dynamic motions for legged robots remains a challenging problem. While reinforcement learning has achieved notable success in various legged locomotion tasks, producing highly dynamic behaviors often requires extensive reward…

We present a computational design system that assists users to model, optimize, and fabricate quad-robots with soft skins.Our system addresses the challenging task of predicting their physical behavior by fully integrating the multibody…

The collective operation of robots, such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) operating as a team or swarm, is affected by their individual capabilities, which in turn is dependent on their physical design, aka morphology. However, with the…

In this work, we present a method for minimizing the time required for a redundant dual-arm robot to follow a desired relative Cartesian path at constant path speed by optimizing its joint trajectories, subject to position, velocity, and…