Related papers: Impact Mitigation for Dynamic Legged Robots with S…
Reaction force-aware control is essential for legged climbing robots to ensure a safer and more stable operation. This becomes particularly crucial when navigating steep terrain or operating in microgravity environments, where excessive…
Achieving stable hopping has been a hallmark challenge in the field of dynamic legged locomotion. Controlled hopping is notably difficult due to extended periods of underactuation combined with very short ground phases wherein ground…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
Learning-based approaches have recently shown notable success in legged locomotion. However, these approaches often lack accountability, necessitating empirical tests to determine their effectiveness. In this work, we are interested in…
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…
SLOT (Soft Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod), a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot with 3D-printed TPU legs, is presented to study physics-informed modeling and control of compliant legged locomotion using only four actuators. Each leg is…
When do locomotion controllers require reasoning about nonlinearities? In this work, we show that a whole-body model-predictive controller using a simple linear time-invariant approximation of the whole-body dynamics is able to execute…
Locomotion on dynamic rigid surface (i.e., rigid surface accelerating in an inertial frame) presents complex challenges for controller design, which are essential for deploying humanoid robots in dynamic real-world environments such as…
This paper presents a scalable and adaptive control framework for legged robots that integrates Iterative Learning Control (ILC) with a biologically inspired torque library (TL), analogous to muscle memory. The proposed method addresses key…
Industrial manipulators do not collapse under their own weight when powered off due to the friction in their joints. Although these mechanism are effective for stiff position control of pick-and-place, they are inappropriate for legged…
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…
We present a novel control strategy for dynamic legged locomotion in complex scenarios, that considers information about the morphology of the terrain in contexts when only on-board mapping and computation are available. The strategy is…
Simultaneous locomotion and manipulation enables robots to interact with their environment beyond the constraints of a fixed base. However, coordinating legged locomotion with arm manipulation, while considering safety and compliance during…
Robot systems for teleoperation commonly use a spring-like force pulling the follower robot towards the leader's position to track their movements. With this control strategy, the tracking accuracy deteriorates when the follower' stiffness…
Quadruped robots are often designed with rigid feet to simplify control and maintain stable contact during locomotion. While this approach is straightforward, it limits the ability of the legs to absorb impact forces and reuse stored…
Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…
Collaborative robots and space manipulators contain significant joint flexibility. It complicates the control design, compromises the control bandwidth, and limits the tracking accuracy. The imprecise knowledge of the flexible joint…
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…
A distinctive feature of quadrupeds that is integral to their locomotion is the tail. Tails serve many purposes in biological systems including propulsion, counterbalance, and stabilization while walking, running, climbing, or jumping.…
Legged robots have demonstrated remarkable agility on rigid, stationary ground, but their locomotion reliability remains limited in non-inertial environments, where the supporting ground moves, tilts, or accelerates. Such conditions arise…