Related papers: Environmental force sensing helps robots traverse …

The long-standing, dominant approach to robotic obstacle negotiation relies on mapping environmental geometry to avoid obstacles. However, this approach does not allow for traversal of cluttered obstacles, hindering applications such as…

Despite contending with constraints imposed by the environment, morphology, and physiology, animals move well by physically interactingwith the environment to use and transition between modes such as running, climbing, and self-righting. By…

To traverse complex natural terrain, animals often transition between locomotor modes. It is well known that locomotor transitions can be induced by switching in neural control circuits or be driven by a need to minimize metabolic energetic…

Robots are still poor at traversing cluttered large obstacles required for important applications like search and rescue. By contrast, animals are excellent at doing so, often using direct physical interaction with obstacles rather than…

Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when moving through complex 3-D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact with the obstacles.…

Effective locomotion in nature happens by transitioning across multiple modes (e.g., walk, run, climb). Despite this, far more mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion has been on how to generate and stabilize around…

Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…

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…

Much current study of legged locomotion has rightly focused on foot traction forces, including on granular media. Future legged millirobots will need to go through terrain, such as brush or other vegetation, where the body contact forces…

In many applications, robots are increasingly deployed in unstructured and natural environments where they encounter various types of vegetation. Vegetation presents unique challenges as a traversable obstacle, where the mechanical…

Despite advances in a diversity of environments, snake robots are still far behind snakes in traversing complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles. This is due to a lack of understanding of how to control 3-D body bending to push against…

It is well known that animals can use neural and sensory feedback via vision, tactile sensing, and echolocation to negotiate obstacles. Similarly, most robots use deliberate or reactive planning to avoid obstacles, which relies on prior…

This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…

Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…

To traverse complex three-dimensional terrainwith large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, the most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize…

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…

As mobile robots become useful performing everyday tasks in complex real-world environments, they must be able to traverse a range of difficult terrain types such as stairs, stepping stones, gaps, jumps and narrow passages. This work…

Identifying the physical properties of the surrounding environment is essential for robotic locomotion and navigation to deal with non-geometric hazards, such as slippery and deformable terrains. It would be of great benefit for robots to…

Legged robots are well-suited for broad exploration tasks in complex environments with yielding terrain. Understanding robotic foot-terrain interactions is critical for safe locomotion and walking efficiency for legged robots. This paper…

This research focuses on developing reinforcement learning approaches for the locomotion generation of small-size quadruped robots. The rat robot NeRmo is employed as the experimental platform. Due to the constrained volume, small-size…