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Many humanoid and multi-legged robots are controlled in positions rather than in torques, which prevents direct control of contact forces, and hampers their ability to create multiple contacts to enhance their balance, such as placing a…
Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from symbolic systems have great potential for reasoning about high-level…
The ability of legged systems to traverse highly-constrained environments depends by and large on the performance of their motion and balance controllers. This paper presents a controller that excels in a scenario that most state-of-the-art…
Most animal and human locomotion behaviors for solving complex tasks involve dynamic motions and rich contact interaction. In fact, complex maneuvers need to consider dynamic movement and contact events at the same time. We present a…
Collision avoidance in unknown obstacle-cluttered environments may not always be feasible. This paper focuses on an emerging paradigm shift in which potential collisions with the environment can be harnessed instead of being avoided…
The problem of dynamic locomotion over rough terrain requires both accurate foot placement together with an emphasis on dynamic stability. Existing approaches to this problem prioritize immediate safe foot placement over longer term dynamic…
Locomotion has seen dramatic progress for walking or running across challenging terrains. However, robotic quadrupeds are still far behind their biological counterparts, such as dogs, which display a variety of agile skills and can use the…
In recent years, impressive results have been achieved in robotic manipulation. While many efforts focus on generating collision-free reference signals, few allow safe contact between the robot bodies and the environment. However, in…
Mobility on asteroids by multi-limbed climbing robots is expected to achieve our exploration goals in such challenging environments. We propose a mobility strategy to improve the locomotion safety of climbing robots in such harsh…
Generalizable manipulation requires that robots be able to interact with novel objects and environment. This requirement makes manipulation extremely challenging as a robot has to reason about complex frictional interactions with…
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…
Recent literature in the robotics community has focused on learning robot behaviors that abstract out lower-level details of robot control. To fully leverage the efficacy of such behaviors, it is necessary to select and sequence them to…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This paper presents a deformable…
In this work, we introduce a framework that enables highly maneuverable locomotion using non-periodic contacts. This task is challenging for traditional optimization and planning methods to handle due to difficulties in specifying contact…
Developing robust locomotion for humanoid robots is a complex task due to the unstable nature of these robots and also to the unpredictability of the terrain. A robust locomotion planner is one of the fundamental components for generating…
Robots need to manipulate objects in constrained environments like shelves and cabinets when assisting humans in everyday settings like homes and offices. These constraints make manipulation difficult by reducing grasp accessibility, so…
Robot manipulation in cluttered scenes often requires contact-rich interactions with objects. It can be more economical to interact via non-prehensile actions, for example, push through other objects to get to the desired grasp pose,…
This paper presents a safety-critical approach to the coordination of robots in dynamic environments. To this end, we leverage control barrier functions (CBFs) with the forward reachable set to guarantee the safe coordination of the robots…
Functional autonomous systems often realize complex tasks by utilizing state machines comprised of discrete primitive behaviors and transitions between these behaviors. This architecture has been widely studied in the context of…
In this paper, the problem of making a safe compliant contact between a human and an assistive robot is considered. Users with disabilities have a need to utilize their assistive robots for physical human-robot interaction (PHRI) during…