Related papers: Environmental force sensing helps robots traverse …

Attaining animal-like legged locomotion on rough outdoor terrain with sparse foothold affordances -a primary use-case for legs vs other forms of locomotion- is a largely open problem. New advancements in control and perception have enabled…

Robotic spacecraft have helped expand our reach for many planetary exploration missions. Most ground mobile planetary exploration robots use wheeled or modified wheeled platforms. Although extraordinarily successful at completing intended…

To function autonomously in the physical world, humanoid robots need high-fidelity sensing systems, especially for forces that cannot be easily modeled. Modeling forces in robot feet is particularly challenging due to static indeterminacy,…

Robot-assisted dressing could profoundly enhance the quality of life of adults with physical disabilities. To achieve this, a robot can benefit from both visual and force sensing. The former enables the robot to ascertain human body pose…

In order to be effective partners for humans, robots must become increasingly comfortable with making contact with their environment. Unfortunately, it is hard for robots to distinguish between ``just enough'' and ``too much'' force: some…

Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has made significant strides in legged robot control, enabling locomotion across diverse terrains and complex loco-manipulation capabilities. However, the commonly used position or velocity tracking-based…

Legged robots must exhibit robust and agile locomotion across diverse, unstructured terrains, a challenge exacerbated under blind locomotion settings where terrain information is unavailable. This work introduces a hierarchical…

Search processes in the natural world are often punctuated by home returns that reset the position of foraging animals, birds, and insects. Many theoretical, numerical, and experimental studies have now demonstrated that this strategy can…

Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…

This paper describes a method of online refinement of a scene recognition model for robot navigation considering traversable plants, flexible plant parts which a robot can push aside while moving. In scene recognition systems that consider…

Autonomous exploration allows mobile robots to navigate in initially unknown territories in order to build complete representations of the environments. In many real-life applications, environments often contain dynamic obstacles which can…

Terrestrial animals and robots are susceptible to flipping-over during rapid locomotion in complex terrains. However, small robots are less capable of self-righting from an upside-down orientation compared to small animals like insects.…

Large-scale environmental sensing with a finite number of mobile sensors is a challenging task that requires a lot of resources and time. This is especially true when features in the environment are spatiotemporally changing with unknown or…

Moving in dynamic pedestrian environments is one of the important requirements for autonomous mobile robots. We present a model-based reinforcement learning approach for robots to navigate through crowded environments. The navigation policy…

Quadruped robots demonstrate exceptional potential for navigating complex terrain in critical applications such as search and rescue missions and infrastructure inspection However autonomous traversal of confined 3D environments including…

The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid…

This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…

Flexible manufacturing processes demand robots to easily adapt to changes in the environment and interact with humans. In such dynamic scenarios, robotic tasks may be programmed through learning-from-demonstration approaches, where a…

Robots built from soft materials can alter their shape and size in a particular profile. This shape-changing ability could be extremely helpful for rescue robots and those operating in unknown terrains and environments. In changing shape,…