Related papers: Impact Mitigation for Dynamic Legged Robots with S…
A safety-critical measure of legged locomotion performance is a robot's ability to track its desired time-varying position trajectory in an environment, which is herein termed as "global-position tracking". This paper introduces a nonlinear…
This paper presents a system for enabling real-time synthesis of whole-body locomotion and manipulation policies for real-world legged robots. Motivated by recent advancements in robot simulation, we leverage the efficient parallelization…
This paper presents three feedback controllers that achieve an asymptotically stable, periodic, and fast walking gait for a 3D (spatial) bipedal robot consisting of a torso, two legs, and passive (unactuated) point feet. The contact between…
This study explores the dynamics of asymmetrical bounding gaits in quadrupedal robots, focusing on the integration of torso pitching and hip motion to enhance speed and stability. Traditional control strategies often enforce a fixed…
In this paper, we propose a locomotion training framework where a control policy and a state estimator are trained concurrently. The framework consists of a policy network which outputs the desired joint positions and a state estimation…
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.…
Re-planning in legged locomotion is crucial to track the desired user velocity while adapting to the terrain and rejecting external disturbances. In this work, we propose and test in experiments a real-time Nonlinear Model Predictive…
Spring-mass models are well established tools for the analysis and control of legged locomotion. Among the alternatives, spring-loaded inverted pendulum (SLIP) model has shown to be a very accurate descriptor of animal locomotion. Despite…
Legged robots possess a unique ability to traverse rough terrains and navigate cluttered environments, making them well-suited for complex, real-world unstructured scenarios. However, such robots have not yet achieved the same level as seen…
Soft robots are made of compliant materials and perform tasks that are challenging for rigid robots. However, their continuum nature makes it difficult to develop model-based control strategies. This work presents a robust model-based…
Automating dexterous, contact-rich manipulation tasks using rigid robots is a significant challenge in robotics. Rigid robots, defined by their actuation through position commands, face issues of excessive contact forces due to their…
Dynamic legged locomotion is a challenging topic because of the lack of established control schemes which can handle aerial phases, short stance times, and high-speed leg swings. In this paper, we propose a controller combining whole-body…
In this paper, we propose a novel design of an electrically actuated robotic leg, called the DecARt (Decoupled Actuation Robot) Leg, aimed at performing agile locomotion. This design incorporates several new features, such as the use of a…
Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…
In this paper, a reinforced soft robot prototype with a custom-designed actuator-space string encoder are created to investigate dynamic soft robotic trajectory tracking. The soft robot prototype embedded with the proposed adaptive…
Impedance control is a well-established technique to control interaction forces in robotics. However, real implementations of impedance control with an inner loop may suffer from several limitations. Although common practice in designing…
Robots are increasingly being deployed not only in workplaces but also in households. Effectively execute of manipulation tasks by robots relies on variable impedance control with contact forces. Furthermore, robots should possess adaptive…
When humans physically interact with robots, we need the robots to be both safe and performant. Series elastic actuators (SEAs) fundamentally advance safety by introducing compliant actuation. On the one hand, adding a spring mitigates the…
Robot interaction control is often limited to low dynamics or low flexibility, depending on whether an active or passive approach is chosen. In this work, we introduce a hybrid control scheme that combines the advantages of active and…
We propose reaching steps towards the real-time strain control of multiphysics, multiscale continuum soft robots. To study this problem fundamentally, we ground ourselves in a model-based control setting enabled by mathematically precise…