Related papers: Bio-inspired Rhythmic Locomotion in a Six-Legged R…
It is well known that animals can use neural and sensory feedback via vision, tactile sensing, and echolocation to negotiate obstacles. Similarly, most robots use deliberate or reactive planning to avoid obstacles, which relies on prior…
Animals, such as birds, widely use multi-modal locomotion by combining legged and aerial mobility with dominant inertial effects. The robotic biomimicry of this multi-modal locomotion feat can yield ultra-flexible systems in terms of their…
Despite the extensive presence of the legged locomotion in animals, it is extremely challenging to be reproduced with robots. Legged locomotion is an dynamic task which benefits from a planning that takes advantage of the gravitational pull…
Soft robots require directional control to navigate complex terrains. However, achieving such control often requires multiple actuators, which increases mechanical complexity, complicates control systems, and raises energy consumption.…
Legged locomotion is a challenging task for learning algorithms, especially when the task requires a diverse set of primitive behaviors. To solve these problems, we introduce a hierarchical framework to automatically decompose complex…
Animals use limbs for both locomotion and manipulation. We aim to equip quadruped robots with similar versatility. This work introduces a system that enables quadruped robots to interact with objects using their legs, inspired by…
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…
Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Wheeled bipedal robots (WBRs) have the capability to execute agile and versatile locomotion tasks. This paper focuses on improving the dynamic performance of WBRs through innovations in both hardware and software development. Inspired by…
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…
This paper presents a real-time gait driven training framework for humanoid robots. First, we introduce a novel gait planner that incorporates dynamics to design the desired joint trajectory. In the gait design process, the 3D robot model…
As humanoid robots enter real-world environments, ensuring robust locomotion across diverse environments is crucial. This paper presents a computationally efficient hierarchical control framework for humanoid robot locomotion based on…
Achieving stable and robust perceptive locomotion for bipedal robots in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge due to complex terrain geometry and susceptibility to external disturbances. In this work, we propose a…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in legged locomotion over various challenging environments. However, due to the sim-to-real gap and lack of explainability, unconstrained RL policies deployed in the real…
Developing agile behaviors for legged robots remains a challenging problem. While deep reinforcement learning is a promising approach, learning truly agile behaviors typically requires tedious reward shaping and careful curriculum design.…
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 task of self-balancing is one of the most important tasks when developing humanoid robots. This paper proposes a novel external balance mechanism for humanoid robot to maintain sideway balance. First, a dynamic model of the humanoid…
Imitation learning has been actively studied in recent years. In particular, skill acquisition by a robot with a fixed body, whose root link position and posture and camera angle of view do not change, has been realized in many cases. On…
Modern climbing robots have risen to great heights, but mechanisms meant to scale cliffs often locomote slowly and over-cautiously on level ground. Here we introduce T-RHex, an iteration on the classic cockroach-inspired hexapod that has…