Related papers: Design and Control of a Recovery System for Legged…

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…

In this paper, we present a novel control framework to achieve robust push recovery on bipedal robots while locomoting. The key contribution is the unification of hybrid system models of locomotion with a reduced-order model predictive…

Quadrupedal robots have emerged as a cutting-edge platform for assisting humans, finding applications in tasks related to inspection and exploration in remote areas. Nevertheless, their floating base structure renders them susceptible to…

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…

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…

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…

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…

While quadruped robots usually have good stability and load capacity, bipedal robots offer a higher level of flexibility / adaptability to different tasks and environments. A multi-modal legged robot can take the best of both worlds. In…

Safety concerns during the operation of legged robots must be addressed to enable their widespread use. Machine learning-based control methods that use model-based constraints provide promising means to improve robot safety. This study…

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…

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…

Bipedal locomotion makes humanoid robots inherently prone to falls, causing catastrophic damage to the expensive sensors, actuators, and structural components of full-scale robots. To address this critical barrier to real-world deployment,…

Legged robots have achieved impressive feats in dynamic locomotion in challenging unstructured terrain. However, in entertainment applications, the design and control of these robots face additional challenges in appealing to human…

Flippers are essential components of tracked robot locomotion systems for unstructured terrain, especially within a rescue scenario. Achieving full and semi-autonomy for such rescue robots is the goal of many research efforts. In this work,…

The deployment of robots in industrial and civil scenarios is a viable solution to protect operators from danger and hazards. Shared autonomy is paramount to enable remote control of complex systems such as legged robots, allowing the…

The high probability of hardware failures prevents many advanced robots (e.g., legged robots) from being confidently deployed in real-world situations (e.g., post-disaster rescue). Instead of attempting to diagnose the failures, robots…

The three bio-inspired strategies that have been used for balance recovery of biped robots are the ankle, hip and stepping Strategies. However, there are several cases for a biped robot where stepping is not possible, e. g. when the…

Robots are increasingly entering uncertain and unstructured environments. Within these, robots are bound to face unexpected external disturbances like accidental human or tool collisions. Robots must develop the capacity to respond to…

Controlling contact forces during interactions is critical for locomotion and manipulation tasks. While sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has succeeded in many contact-rich problems, current RL methods achieve forceful interactions…

Due to their ability to adapt to different terrains, quadruped robots have drawn much attention in the research field of robot learning. Legged mobile manipulation, where a quadruped robot is equipped with a robotic arm, can greatly enhance…