Related papers: Optimizing Gait Libraries via a Coverage Metric

Robots have been critical instruments to space exploration by providing access to environments beyond human limitations. Jumping robot concepts are attractive solutions to negotiate complex terrain. However, among the engineering challenges…

Locomotion for legged robots poses considerable challenges when confronted by obstacles and adverse environments. Footstep planners are typically only designed for one mode of locomotion, but traversing unfavorable environments may require…

Many order fulfillment applications in logistics, such as packing, involve picking objects from unstructured piles before tightly arranging them in bins or shipping containers. Desirable robotic solutions in this space need to be low-cost,…

Trajectory optimization with contact-rich behaviors has recently gained attention for generating diverse locomotion behaviors without pre-specified ground contact sequences. However, these approaches rely on precise models of robot dynamics…

Model free reinforcement learning suffers from the high sampling complexity inherent to robotic manipulation or locomotion tasks. Most successful approaches typically use random sampling strategies which leads to slow policy convergence. In…

Navigation and motion control of a robot to a destination are tasks that have historically been performed with the assumption that contact with the environment is harmful. This makes sense for rigid-bodied robots where obstacle collisions…

Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…

To dynamically traverse challenging terrain, legged robots need to continually perceive and reason about upcoming features, adjust the locations and timings of future footfalls and leverage momentum strategically. We present a pipeline that…

Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…

Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait…

This paper aims to improve the computational efficiency of motion planning for mobile robots with non-trivial dynamics through the use of learned controllers. Offline, a system-specific controller is first trained in an empty environment.…

Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…

Reduced-order models (ROM) are popular in online motion planning due to their simplicity. A good ROM for control captures critical task-relevant aspects of the full dynamics while remaining low dimensional. However, planning within the…

Internal computational models of physical bodies are fundamental to the ability of robots and animals alike to plan and control their actions. These "self-models" allow robots to consider outcomes of multiple possible future actions,…

In a world designed for legs, quadrupeds, bipeds, and humanoids have the opportunity to impact emerging robotics applications from logistics, to agriculture, to home assistance. The goal of this survey is to cover the recent progress toward…

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…

Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…

Wheeled-legged robots have the potential for highly agile and versatile locomotion. The combination of legs and wheels might be a solution for any real-world application requiring rapid, and long-distance mobility skills on challenging…

Locating and grasping of objects by robots is typically performed using visual sensors. Haptic feedback from contacts with the environment is only secondary if present at all. In this work, we explored an extreme case of searching for and…

Robust motion planning is a well-studied problem in the robotics literature, yet current algorithms struggle to operate scalably and safely in the presence of other moving agents, such as humans. This paper introduces a novel framework for…