Related papers: Receding-Horizon Perceptive Trajectory Optimizatio…

Legged robots are becoming increasingly agile in exhibiting dynamic behaviors such as running and jumping. Usually, such behaviors are either optimized and engineered offline (i.e. the behavior is designed for before it is needed), either…

Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning…

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…

Deployment in hazardous environments requires robots to understand the risks associated with their actions and movements to prevent accidents. Despite its importance, these risks are not explicitly modeled by currently deployed locomotion…

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…

State-of-the-art perceptive Reinforcement Learning controllers for legged robots either (i) impose oscillator or IK-based gait priors that constrain the action space, add bias to the policy optimization and reduce adaptability across robot…

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…

Lagrangian Neural Networks (LNNs) present a principled and interpretable framework for learning the system dynamics by utilizing inductive biases. While traditional dynamics models struggle with compounding errors over long horizons, LNNs…

Hybrid locomotion of wheeled-legged robots has recently attracted increasing attention due to their advantages of combining the agility of legged locomotion and the efficiency of wheeled motion. But along with expanded performance, the…

Perceptive locomotion for legged robots requires anticipating and adapting to complex, dynamic environments. Model Predictive Control (MPC) serves as a strong baseline, providing interpretable motion planning with constraint enforcement,…

Terrain-aware locomotion has become an emerging topic in legged robotics. However, it is hard to generate diverse, challenging, and realistic unstructured terrains in simulation, which limits the way researchers evaluate their locomotion…

This paper addresses the problem of legged locomotion in non-flat terrain. As legged robots such as quadrupeds are to be deployed in terrains with geometries which are difficult to model and predict, the need arises to equip them with the…

Whole-body humanoid locomotion is challenging due to high-dimensional control, morphological instability, and the need for real-time adaptation to various terrains using onboard perception. Directly applying reinforcement learning (RL) with…

Legged robots have enormous potential in their range of capabilities, from navigating unstructured terrains to high-speed running. However, designing robust controllers for highly agile dynamic motions remains a substantial challenge for…

Legged robots navigating crowded scenes and complex terrains in the real world are required to execute dynamic leg movements while processing visual input for obstacle avoidance and path planning. We show that a quadruped robot can acquire…

We present a novel outdoor navigation algorithm to generate stable and efficient actions to navigate a robot to reach a goal. We use a multi-stage training pipeline and show that our approach produces policies that result in stable and…

Quadruped robots have shown remarkable mobility on various terrains through reinforcement learning. Yet, in the presence of sparse footholds and risky terrains such as stepping stones and balance beams, which require precise foot placement…

The design of gaits for robot locomotion can be a daunting process which requires significant expert knowledge and engineering. This process is even more challenging for robots that do not have an accurate physical model, such as compliant…

Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…

Limitations in actuation, sensing, and computation have forced small legged robots to rely on carefully tuned, mechanically mediated leg trajectories for effective locomotion. Recent advances in manufacturing, however, have enabled the…