Related papers: Environmental force sensing helps robots traverse …
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
Dexterous manipulation of objects through fine control of physical contacts is essential for many important tasks of daily living. A fundamental ability underlying fine contact control is compliant control, \textit{i.e.}, controlling the…
Deep reinforcement learning has proven to be a great success in allowing agents to learn complex tasks. However, its application to actual robots can be prohibitively expensive. Furthermore, the unpredictability of human behavior in…
In this paper, we consider the problem of multirotor flying robots physically interacting with the environment under wind influence. The result are the first algorithms for simultaneous online estimation of contact and aerodynamic wrenches…
Stable locomotion in precipitous environments is an essential task for quadruped robots, requiring the ability to resist various external disturbances. Recent neural policies enhance robustness against disturbances by learning to resist…
Animals such as rabbits and birds can instantly generate locomotion behavior in reaction to a dynamic, approaching object, such as a person or a rock, despite having possibly never seen the object before and having limited perception of the…
Walking animals, like stick insects, cockroaches or ants, demonstrate a fascinating range of locomotive abilities and complex behaviors. The locomotive behaviors can consist of a variety of walking patterns along with adaptation that allow…
This work reports on developing a deep inverse reinforcement learning method for legged robots terrain traversability modeling that incorporates both exteroceptive and proprioceptive sensory data. Existing works use robot-agnostic…
Humans excel at robust bipedal walking in complex natural environments. In each step, they adequately tune the interaction of biomechanical muscle dynamics and neuronal signals to be robust against uncertainties in ground conditions.…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
Animals and robots must self-right on the ground after overturning. Biology research described various strategies and motor patterns in many species. Robotics research devised many strategies. However, we do not well understand how the…
The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Subterranean Challenge requires teams of robots to traverse difficult and diverse underground environments. Traversing small gaps is one of the challenging scenarios that robots…
Existing navigation policies for autonomous robots tend to focus on collision avoidance while ignoring human-robot interactions in social life. For instance, robots can pass along the corridor safer and easier if pedestrians notice them.…
Recent literature in the robotics community has focused on learning robot behaviors that abstract out lower-level details of robot control. To fully leverage the efficacy of such behaviors, it is necessary to select and sequence them to…
Humans possess delicate dynamic balance mechanisms that enable them to maintain stability across diverse terrains and under extreme conditions. However, despite significant advances recently, existing locomotion algorithms for humanoid…
The paper proposes a reliable and robust planning solution to the long range robotic navigation problem in extremely cluttered environments. A two-layer planning architecture is proposed that leverages both the environment map and the…
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…
For robots with low rigidity, determining the robot's state based solely on kinematics is challenging. This is particularly crucial for a robot whose entire body is in contact with the environment, as accurate state estimation is essential…
Although robots with flexible bodies are superior in terms of the contact and adaptability, it is difficult to control them precisely. On the other hand, human beings make use of the surrounding environments to stabilize their bodies and…
The challenge of traversability estimation is a crucial aspect of autonomous navigation in unstructured outdoor environments such as forests. It involves determining whether certain areas are passable or risky for robots, taking into…