Related papers: Environmental force sensing helps robots traverse …
Quadruped robots are often designed with rigid feet to simplify control and maintain stable contact during locomotion. While this approach is straightforward, it limits the ability of the legs to absorb impact forces and reuse stored…
The semantics of the environment, such as the terrain type and property, reveals important information for legged robots to adjust their behaviors. In this work, we present a framework that learns semantics-aware locomotion skills from…
Real-world applications require a robot operating in the physical world with awareness of potential risks besides accomplishing the task. A large part of risky behaviors arises from interacting with objects in ignorance of affordance. To…
Dense collections of movable objects are common in everyday spaces-from cabinets in a home to shelves in a warehouse. Safely retracting objects from such collections is difficult for robots, yet people do it frequently, leveraging learned…
In critical applications, including search-and-rescue in degraded environments, blockages can be prevalent and prevent the effective deployment of certain sensing modalities, particularly vision, due to occlusion and the constrained range…
Snakes can move through almost any terrain. Although their locomotion on flat surfaces using planar gaits is inherently stable, when snakes deform their body out of plane to traverse complex terrain, maintaining stability becomes a…
Modular robotics research has long been preoccupied with perfecting the modules themselves -- their actuation methods, connectors, controls, communication, and fabrication. This inward focus results, in part, from the complexity of the task…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
Animals learn to adapt speed of their movements to their capabilities and the environment they observe. Mobile robots should also demonstrate this ability to trade-off aggressiveness and safety for efficiently accomplishing tasks. The aim…
Accurate traversability estimation is essential for safe and effective navigation of outdoor robots operating in complex environments. This paper introduces a novel experience-based method that allows robots to autonomously learn which…
Studying snake robot locomotion in a cluttered environment has been a complicated task because the motion model is discontinuous due to the physical contact with obstacles, and the contact force cannot be determined solely by contact…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
In collective motion, perceptually-limited individuals move in an ordered manner, without centralized control. The perception of each individual is highly localized, as is its ability to interact with others. While natural collective motion…
The major challenges of collision avoidance for robot navigation in crowded scenes lie in accurate environment modeling, fast perceptions, and trustworthy motion planning policies. This paper presents a novel adaptive environment model…
Muddy terrains present significant challenges for terrestrial robots, as subtle changes in composition and water content can lead to large variations in substrate strength and force responses, causing the robot to slip or get stuck. This…
Efficient navigation in dynamic environments is crucial for autonomous robots interacting with moving agents and static obstacles. We present a novel deep reinforcement learning approach that improves robot navigation and interaction with…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
For soft robots to work effectively in human-centered environments, they need to be able to estimate their state and external interactions based on (proprioceptive) sensors. Estimating disturbances allows a soft robot to perform desirable…
Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…
Soft robot manipulators have the potential for deployment in delicate environments to perform complex manipulation tasks. However, existing obstacle detection and avoidance methods do not consider limits on the forces that manipulators may…