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An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated…
During learning trials, systems are exposed to different failure conditions which may break robotic parts before a safe behavior is discovered. Humans contour this problem by grounding their learning to a safer structure/control first and…
Gaits and transitions are key components in legged locomotion. For legged robots, describing and reproducing gaits as well as transitions remain longstanding challenges. Reinforcement learning has become a powerful tool to formulate…
This work proposes a novel approach to social robot navigation by learning to generate robot controls from a social motion latent space. By leveraging this social motion latent space, the proposed method achieves significant improvements in…
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…
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…
This paper presents a framework to navigate visually impaired people through unfamiliar environments by means of a mobile manipulator. The Human-Robot system consists of three key components: a mobile base, a robotic arm, and the human…
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…
Enabling robots to autonomously navigate unknown, complex, and dynamic real-world environments presents several challenges, including imperfect perception, partial observability, localization uncertainty, and safety constraints. Current…
Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…
Autonomous navigation is a long-standing field of robotics research, which provides an essential capability for mobile robots to execute a series of tasks on the same environments performed by human everyday. In this chapter, we present a…
Contemporary robots have become exceptionally skilled at achieving specific tasks in structured environments. However, they often fail when faced with the limitless permutations of real-world unstructured environments. This motivates…
As robotic agents increasingly assist humans in reality, quadruped robots offer unique opportunities for interaction in complex scenarios due to their agile movement. However, building agents that can autonomously navigate, adapt, and…
Deep neural networks trained on demonstrations of human actions give robot the ability to perform self-driving on the road. However, navigation in a pedestrian-rich environment, such as a campus setup, is still challenging---one needs to…
Can a quadrupedal robot perform bipedal motions like humans? Although developing human-like behaviors is more often studied on costly bipedal robot platforms, we present a solution over a lightweight quadrupedal robot that unlocks the…
Legged robots need to be capable of walking on diverse terrain conditions. In this paper, we present a novel reinforcement learning framework for learning locomotion on non-rigid dynamic terrains. Specifically, our framework can generate…
While there is no replacement for the learned expertise, devotion, and social benefits of a guide dog, there are cases in which a robot navigation assistant could be helpful for individuals with blindness or low vision (BLV). This study…
In this paper, we present a framework rooted in control and planning that enables quadrupedal robots to traverse challenging terrains with discrete footholds using visual feedback. Navigating discrete terrain is challenging for quadrupeds…
Autonomous robot navigation within the dynamic unknown environment is of crucial significance for mobile robotic applications including robot navigation in last-mile delivery and robot-enabled automated supplies in industrial and hospital…
Quadruped robots have the distinct ability to adapt their body and step height to navigate through cluttered environments. Nonetheless, for these robots to utilize their full potential in real-world scenarios, they require awareness of…