Related papers: Vision-based Navigation for a Small-scale Quadrupe…
Wheeled-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheels with the obstacle negotiation of legs, yet many state-of-the-art systems rely on costly actuators and sensors, and fall-recovery is seldom integrated, especially for wheeled-legged…
Quadruped robots are currently a widespread platform for robotics research, thanks to powerful Reinforcement Learning controllers and the availability of cheap and robust commercial platforms. However, to broaden the adoption of the…
We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to develop a point-goal navigation system for legged robots, called VP-Nav. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully…
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…
How can a robot navigate successfully in rich and diverse environments, indoors or outdoors, along office corridors or trails on the grassland, on the flat ground or the staircase? To this end, this work aims to address three challenges:…
Quadrupeds are strong candidates for navigating challenging environments because of their agile and dynamic designs. This paper presents a methodology that extends the range of exploration for quadrupedal robots by creating an end-to-end…
The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing…
Machine perception is an important prerequisite for safe interaction and locomotion in dynamic environments. This requires not only the timely perception of surrounding geometries and distances but also the ability to react to changing…
Robots are increasingly integrated across industries, particularly in healthcare. However, many valuable applications for quadrupedal robots remain overlooked. This research explores the effectiveness of three reinforcement learning…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
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…
Recent Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) advancements are promising, but their idealized assumptions about robot movement and control fail to reflect physically embodied deployment challenges. To bridge this gap, we introduce VLN-PE, a…
Navigational perception for visually impaired people has been substantially promoted by both classic and deep learning based segmentation methods. In classic visual recognition methods, the segmentation models are mostly object-dependent,…
Traditional approaches to quadruped control frequently employ simplified, hand-derived models. This significantly reduces the capability of the robot since its effective kinematic range is curtailed. In addition, kinodynamic constraints are…
To dynamically traverse challenging terrain, legged robots need to continually perceive and reason about upcoming features, adjust the locations and timings of future footfalls and leverage momentum strategically. We present a pipeline that…
The ability to perform locomotion in various terrains is critical for legged robots. However, the robot has to have a better understanding of the surface it is walking on to perform robust locomotion on different terrains. Animals and…
Navigating cluttered environments is a challenging task for any mobile system. Existing approaches for ground-based mobile systems primarily focus on small wheeled robots, which face minimal constraints with overhanging obstacles and cannot…
The deployment of autonomous service robots in human-centric environments is hindered by a critical gap in perception and planning. Traditional navigation systems rely on expensive LiDARs that, while geometrically precise, are semantically…
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…
This paper explores the principles for transforming a quadrupedal robot into a guide robot for individuals with visual impairments. A guide robot has great potential to resolve the limited availability of guide animals that are accessible…