Related papers: The MIT Humanoid Robot: Design, Motion Planning, a…
Recent trends in humanoid robot control have successfully employed imitation learning to enable the learned generation of smooth, human-like trajectories from human data. While these approaches make more realistic motions possible, they are…
This paper proposes a technique for automatic gain tuning of a momentum based balancing controller for humanoid robots. The controller ensures the stabilization of the centroidal dynamics and the associated zero dynamics. Then, the…
Robotic manipulation demands precise control over both contact forces and motion trajectories. While force control is essential for achieving compliant interaction and high-frequency adaptation, it is limited to operations in close…
Humanoid robots, as general-purpose physical agents, must integrate both intelligent control and adaptive morphology to operate effectively in diverse real-world environments. While recent research has focused primarily on optimizing…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
Imitation learning from human motion capture (MoCap) data provides a promising way to train humanoid robots. However, due to differences in morphology, such as varying degrees of joint freedom and force limits, exact replication of human…
Motion planning and control are key problems in a collection of robotic applications including the design of autonomous agile vehicles and of minimalist manipulators. These problems can be accurately formalized within the language of affine…
The human shoulder, with its glenohumeral joint, tendons, ligaments, and muscles, allows for the execution of complex tasks with precision and efficiency. However, current robotic shoulder designs lack the compliance and compactness…
A hyper-redundant robotic arm is a manipulator with many degrees of freedom, capable of executing tasks in cluttered environments where robotic arms with fewer degrees of freedom are unable to operate. This paper introduces a new method for…
Motion mimicking, i.e., encouraging the control policy to mimic human motion, facilitates the learning of complex tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) for humanoid robots. Although standard RL frameworks demonstrate impressive locomotion…
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…
To achieve highly dynamic jumps of legged robots, it is essential to control the rotational dynamics of the robot. In this paper, we aim to improve the jumping performance by proposing a unified model for planning highly dynamic jumps that…
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…
Robot designs can take many inspirations from nature, where there are many examples of highly resilient and fault-tolerant locomotion strategies to navigate complex terrains by using multi-functional appendages. For example, Chukar and…
We aim to build complex humanoid agents that integrate perception, motor control, and memory. In this work, we partly factor this problem into low-level motor control from proprioception and high-level coordination of the low-level skills…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
Soccer kicking is a complex whole-body motion that requires intricate coordination of various motor actions. To accomplish such dynamic motion in a humanoid robot, the robot needs to simultaneously: 1) transfer high kinetic energy to the…
Several recently released humanoid robots, inspired by the mechanical design of Cassie, employ actuator configurations in which the motors are displaced from the joints to reduce leg inertia. While studies accounting for the full kinematic…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
The paper presents a planner to generate walking trajectories by using the centroidal dynamics and the full kinematics of a humanoid robot. The interaction between the robot and the walking surface is modeled explicitly via new conditions,…