Related papers: Environmental force sensing helps robots traverse …
Enabling robots to walk and run on yielding terrain is increasingly vital to endeavors ranging from disaster response to extraterrestrial exploration. While dynamic legged locomotion on rigid ground is challenging enough, yielding terrain…
Environments with large terrain height variations present great challenges for legged robot locomotion. Drawing inspiration from fire ants' collective assembly behavior, we study strategies that can enable two ``connectable'' robots to…
Although legged robots demonstrate impressive mobility on rough terrain, using them safely in cluttered environments remains a challenge. A key issue is their inability to avoid stepping on low-lying objects, such as high-cost small devices…
Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…
Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically expand the operational domains of robotics. However,…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
A robot making contact with an environment or human presents potential safety risks, including excessive collision force. While experiments on the effect of robot inertia, relative velocity, and interface stiffness on collision are in…
Recent advancements in legged locomotion research have made legged robots a preferred choice for navigating challenging terrains when compared to their wheeled counterparts. This paper presents a novel locomotion policy, trained using Deep…
Estimating the impact intensity is one of the significant tasks of the legged robot. Accurate feedback of the impact may support the robot to plan a suitable and efficient trajectory to adapt to unknown complex terrains. Ordinarily, this…
This paper describes a method of estimating the traversability of plant parts covering a path and navigating through them for mobile robots operating in plant-rich environments. Conventional mobile robots rely on scene recognition methods…
In nature, legged animals have developed the ability to adapt to challenging terrains through perception, allowing them to plan safe body and foot trajectories in advance, which leads to safe and energy-efficient locomotion. Inspired by…
Humanoid robots can, in principle, use their legs to go almost anywhere. Developing controllers capable of traversing diverse terrains, however, remains a considerable challenge. Classical controllers are hard to generalize broadly while…
Modern two and four legged robots exhibit impressive mobility on complex terrain, largely attributed to advancement in learning algorithms. However, these systems often rely on high-bandwidth sensing and onboard computation to…
Achieving safe quadrupedal locomotion in real-world environments has attracted much attention in recent years. When walking over uneven terrain, achieving reliable estimation and realising safety-critical control based on the obtained…
Snakes can bend their elongate bodies in various forms to traverse various environments. We understand how snakes use lateral bending to push against asperities on flat ground for propulsion, and snake robots can do so effectively. However,…
Interactive applications demand believable characters that respond naturally to dynamic environments. Traditional character animation techniques often struggle to handle arbitrary situations, leading to a growing trend of dynamically…
Legged robots are physically capable of traversing a wide range of challenging environments, but designing controllers that are sufficiently robust to handle this diversity has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Reinforcement…
While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…
The functional demands of robotic systems often require completing various tasks or behaviors under the effect of disturbances or uncertain environments. Of increasing interest is the autonomy for dynamic robots, such as multirotors, motor…
Locomotion by shape changes (spermatozoon swimming, snake slithering, bird flapping) or gas expulsion (rocket firing) is assumed to require environmental interaction, due to conservation of momentum. As first noted in (Wisdom, 2003) and…