Related papers: Verifying Safe Transitions between Dynamic Motion …
Quadruped animals seamlessly transition between gaits as they change locomotion speeds. While the most widely accepted explanation for gait transitions is energy efficiency, there is no clear consensus on the determining factor, nor on the…
In this paper, we propose a novel safe, passive, and robust control law for mechanical systems. The proposed approach addresses safety from a physical human-robot interaction perspective, where a robot must not only stay inside a…
A vast number of applications for legged robots entail tasks in complex, dynamic environments. But these environments put legged robots at high risk for limb damage. This paper presents an empirical study of fault tolerant dynamic gaits…
Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…
We present the design and experimental results of the first 1-DOF, hip-actuated bipedal robot. While passive dynamic walking is simple by nature, many existing bipeds inspired by this form of walking are complex in control, mechanical…
Planning safe motions for legged robots requires sophisticated safety verification tools. However, designing such tools for such complex systems is challenging due to the nonlinear and high-dimensional nature of these systems' dynamics. In…
Despite contending with constraints imposed by the environment, morphology, and physiology, animals move well by physically interactingwith the environment to use and transition between modes such as running, climbing, and self-righting. By…
For a robot to be called socially intelligent, it must be able to infer users internal states from their current behaviour, predict the users future behaviour, and if required, respond appropriately. In this work, we investigate how robots…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Legged robots, specifically quadrupeds, are becoming increasingly attractive for industrial applications such as inspection. However, to leave the laboratory and to become useful to an end user requires reliability in harsh conditions. From…
Human-robot collaboration is on the rise. Robots need to increasingly improve the efficiency and smoothness with which they assist humans by properly anticipating a human's intention. To do so, prediction models need to increase their…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…
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…
To traverse complex three-dimensional terrainwith large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, the most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize…
We investigate the sensorimotor loop of simple robots simulated within the LPZRobots environment from the point of view of dynamical systems theory. For a robot with a cylindrical shaped body and an actuator controlled by a single…
Discrete and periodic contact switching is a key characteristic of steady-state legged locomotion. This paper introduces a framework for modeling and analyzing this contact-switching behavior through the framework of geometric mechanics on…
While quadruped robots usually have good stability and load capacity, bipedal robots offer a higher level of flexibility / adaptability to different tasks and environments. A multi-modal legged robot can take the best of both worlds. In…
Gaits and transitions are key components in legged locomotion. For legged robots, describing and reproducing gaits as well as transitions remain longstanding challenges. Reinforcement learning has become a powerful tool to formulate…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…