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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…
Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such motions and interactions in the presence of imperfect and…
Quadruped robots must exhibit robust walking capabilities in practical applications. In this work, we propose a novel approach that enables quadruped robots to pass various small obstacles, or "tiny traps". Existing methods often rely on…
Legged systems need to optimize contact force in order to maintain contacts. For this, the controller needs to have the knowledge of the surface geometry and how slippery the terrain is. We can use a vision system to realize the terrain,…
Accurate metrical localization is one of the central challenges in mobile robotics. Many existing methods aim at localizing after building a map with the robot. In this paper, we present a novel approach that instead uses geotagged…
This paper presents Vision-Language Global Localization (VLG-Loc), a novel global localization method that uses human-readable labeled footprint maps containing only names and areas of distinctive visual landmarks in an environment. While…
Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult…
Accurate robot localization is essential for effective operation. Monte Carlo Localization (MCL) is commonly used with known maps but is computationally expensive due to landmark matching for each particle. Humanoid robots face additional…
Quadrupedal locomotion over complex terrain has been a long-standing research topic in robotics. While recent reinforcement learning-based locomotion methods improve generalizability and foot-placement precision, they rely on implicit…
Detecting and localizing contacts is essential for robot manipulators to perform contact-rich tasks in unstructured environments. While robot skins can localize contacts on the surface of robot arms, these sensors are not yet robust or…
We present a novel autonomous robot navigation algorithm for outdoor environments that is capable of handling diverse terrain traversability conditions. Our approach, VLM-GroNav, uses vision-language models (VLMs) and integrates them with…
We study the problem of bipedal robot navigation in complex environments with uncertain and rough terrain. In particular, we consider a scenario in which the robot is expected to reach a desired goal location by traversing an environment…
Navigation of a mobile robot is conditioned on the knowledge of its pose. In observer-based localisation configurations its initial pose may not be knowable in advance, leading to the need of its estimation. Solutions to the problem of…
Legged robots carry an IMU, but the inertial solution drifts because consumer-grade IMUs are noisy. However, the feet create intermittent contacts with the environment that can be used to mitigate that drift. This report develops a sequence…
This paper presents a novel vision-based proprioception approach for a soft robotic finger that can estimate and reconstruct tactile interactions in both terrestrial and aquatic environments. The key to this system lies in the finger's…
This work develops a learning-based contact estimator for legged robots that bypasses the need for physical sensors and takes multi-modal proprioceptive sensory data as input. Unlike vision-based state estimators, proprioceptive state…
Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically expand the operational domains of robotics. However,…
This paper considers the problem of active object recognition using touch only. The focus is on adaptively selecting a sequence of wrist poses that achieves accurate recognition by enclosure grasps. It seeks to minimize the number of…
Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…
A new 3D localization and mapping techinque with terrain inclination assistance is proposed in this paper to allow a robot to identify its location and build a global map in an outdoor environment. The Iterative Closest Points (ICP)…