Related papers: Coupling Vision and Proprioception for Navigation …
Legged navigation is typically examined within open-world, off-road, and challenging environments. In these scenarios, estimating external disturbances requires a complex synthesis of multi-modal information. This underlines a major…
We propose a novel method, ProNav, which uses proprioceptive signals for traversability estimation in challenging outdoor terrains for autonomous legged robot navigation. Our approach uses sensor data from a legged robot's joint encoders,…
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…
Legged robots are physically capable of navigating a diverse variety of environments and overcoming a wide range of obstructions. For example, in a search and rescue mission, a legged robot could climb over debris, crawl through gaps, and…
Legged robots, particularly quadrupeds, offer promising navigation capabilities, especially in scenarios requiring traversal over diverse terrains and obstacle avoidance. This paper addresses the challenge of enabling legged robots to…
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…
This work developed a learning framework for perceptive legged locomotion that combines visual feedback, proprioceptive information, and active gait regulation of foot-ground contacts. The perception requires only one forward-facing camera…
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…
Vision-based locomotion has shown great promise in enabling legged robots to perceive and adapt to complex environments. However, visual information is inherently fragile, being vulnerable to occlusions, reflections, and lighting changes,…
The performance of legged locomotion is closely tied to the accuracy and comprehensiveness of state observations. Blind policies, which rely solely on proprioception, are considered highly robust due to the reliability of proprioceptive…
Legged robots that can operate autonomously in remote and hazardous environments will greatly increase opportunities for exploration into under-explored areas. Exteroceptive perception is crucial for fast and energy-efficient locomotion:…
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…
Legged robots possess inherent advantages in traversing complex 3D terrains. However, previous work on low-cost quadruped robots with egocentric vision systems has been limited by a narrow front-facing view and exteroceptive noise,…
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…
Perceptive locomotion for legged robots requires anticipating and adapting to complex, dynamic environments. Model Predictive Control (MPC) serves as a strong baseline, providing interpretable motion planning with constraint enforcement,…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…
Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) empowers agents to associate time-sequenced visual observations with corresponding instructions to make sequential decisions. However, generalization remains a persistent challenge, particularly when…
This paper proposes to solve the problem of Vision-and-Language Navigation with legged robots, which not only provides a flexible way for humans to command but also allows the robot to navigate through more challenging and cluttered scenes.…
We present Visual Navigation and Locomotion over obstacles (ViNL), which enables a quadrupedal robot to navigate unseen apartments while stepping over small obstacles that lie in its path (e.g., shoes, toys, cables), similar to how humans…
Autonomous robots must navigate reliably in unknown environments even under compromised exteroceptive perception, or perception failures. Such failures often occur when harsh environments lead to degraded sensing, or when the perception…