Related papers: Mini Cheetah, the Falling Cat: A Case Study in Mac…
The ability to recover from a fall is an essential feature for a legged robot to navigate in challenging environments robustly. Until today, there has been very little progress on this topic. Current solutions mostly build upon…
Jumping is essential for legged robots to traverse through difficult terrains. In this work, we propose a hierarchical framework that combines optimal control and reinforcement learning to learn continuous jumping motions for quadrupedal…
Automatic fall recovery is a crucial prerequisite before humanoid robots can be reliably deployed. Hand-designing controllers for getting up is difficult because of the varied configurations a humanoid can end up in after a fall and the…
Balancing oneself using the spine is a physiological alignment of the body posture in the most efficient manner by the muscular forces for mammals. For this reason, we can see many disabled quadruped animals can still stand or walk even…
To overcome the obstructions imposed by high-dimensional bipedal models, we embed a stable walking motion in an attractive low-dimensional surface of the system's state space. The process begins with trajectory optimization to design an…
Legged robots must adapt their gait to navigate unpredictable environments, a challenge that animals master with ease. However, most deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches to quadruped locomotion rely on a fixed gait, limiting…
Legged robots have shown promise in locomotion complex environments, but recovery from falls on challenging terrains remains a significant hurdle. This paper presents an Adaptive Fall Recovery (AFR) controller for quadrupedal robots on…
This paper presents a framework for dynamic object catching using a quadruped robot's front legs while it stands on its rear legs. The system integrates computer vision, trajectory prediction, and leg control to enable the quadruped to…
The ability to recover from an unexpected external perturbation is a fundamental motor skill in bipedal locomotion. An effective response includes the ability to not just recover balance and maintain stability but also to fall in a safe…
Performing highly agile dynamic motions, such as jumping or running on uneven stepping stones has remained a challenging problem in legged robot locomotion. This paper presents a framework that combines trajectory optimization and model…
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…
Inverted landing in a rapid and robust manner is a challenging feat for aerial robots, especially while depending entirely on onboard sensing and computation. In spite of this, this feat is routinely performed by biological fliers such as…
For legged robots to match the athletic capabilities of humans and animals, they must not only produce robust periodic walking and running, but also seamlessly switch between nominal locomotion gaits and more specialized transient…
Task space trajectory tracking for quadruped robots plays a crucial role on achieving dexterous maneuvers in unstructured environments. To fulfill the control objective, the robot should apply forces through the contact of the legs with the…
Agile and adaptive maneuvers such as fall recovery, high-speed turning, and sprinting in the wild are challenging for legged systems. We propose a Curricular Hindsight Reinforcement Learning (CHRL) that learns an end-to-end tracking…
The process of robot design is a complex task and the majority of design decisions are still based on human intuition or tedious manual tuning. A more informed way of facing this task is computational design methods where design parameters…
With the research into development of quadruped robots picking up pace, learning based techniques are being explored for developing locomotion controllers for such robots. A key problem is to generate leg trajectories for continuously…
Legged robot locomotion requires the planning of stable reference trajectories, especially while traversing uneven terrain. The proposed trajectory optimization framework is capable of generating dynamically stable base and footstep…
If we consider a cat to be an isolated mechanical system governed by T-invariant mechanics, then its ability to land on its feet after being released from rest is incomprehensible. It is more appropriate to treat the cat as a creature that…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…