Related papers: Environmental force sensing helps robots traverse …

Locomotion for legged robots poses considerable challenges when confronted by obstacles and adverse environments. Footstep planners are typically only designed for one mode of locomotion, but traversing unfavorable environments may require…

Autonomous navigation in unknown 3D environments is a key issue for intelligent transportation, while still being an open problem. Conventionally, navigation risk has been focused on mitigating collisions with obstacles, neglecting the…

Navigating fluently around pedestrians is a necessary capability for mobile robots deployed in human environments, such as buildings and homes. While research on social navigation has focused mainly on the scalability with the number of…

Knowledge of terrain's physical properties inferred from color images can aid in making efficient robotic locomotion plans. However, unlike image classification, it is unintuitive for humans to label image patches with physical properties.…

Navigating autonomous robots through dense forests and rugged terrains is especially daunting when exteroceptive sensors -- such as cameras and LiDAR sensors -- fail under occlusions, low-light conditions, or sensor noise. We present…

For robots to operate autonomously in densely cluttered environments, they must reason about and potentially physically interact with obstacles to clear a path. Safely clearing a path on challenging terrain, such as a cluttered staircase,…

Despite increasing research efforts on household robotics, robots intended for deployment in domestic settings still struggle with more complex tasks such as interacting with functional elements like drawers or light switches, largely due…

Efficient exploration of large-scale environments remains a critical challenge in robotics, with applications ranging from environmental monitoring to search and rescue operations. This article proposes Frontier Shepherding (FroShe), a…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in legged locomotion over various challenging environments. However, due to the sim-to-real gap and lack of explainability, unconstrained RL policies deployed in the real…

Challenges in traversing dynamic clutters lie mainly in the efficient perception of the environmental dynamics and the generation of evasive behaviors considering obstacle movement. Previous solutions have made progress in explicitly…

This paper proposes a safety-critical locomotion control framework employed for legged robots exploring through infeasible path in obstacle-rich environments. Our research focus is on achieving safe and robust locomotion where robots…

Legged robots are becoming increasingly powerful and popular in recent years for their potential to bring the mobility of autonomous agents to the next level. This work presents a deep reinforcement learning approach that learns a robust…

In robotics, catastrophic interference continues to restrain policy training across environments. Efforts to combat catastrophic interference to date focus on novel neural architectures or training methods, with a recent emphasis on…

Objects moving in fluids experience patterns of stress on their surfaces determined by their motion and the geometry of nearby boundaries. Fish and underwater robots can use these patterns for navigation. This paper extends this…

For robots to navigate safely and efficiently on soft, granular terrains, it is crucial to gather information about the terrain's mechanical properties, which directly affect locomotion performance. Recent research has developed robotic…

It is challenging for a mobile robot to navigate through human crowds. Existing approaches usually assume that pedestrians follow a predefined collision avoidance strategy, like social force model (SFM) or optimal reciprocal collision…

Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores…

Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…

The need for contact-rich tasks is rapidly growing in modern manufacturing settings. However, few traditional robotic assembly skills consider environmental constraints during task execution, and most of them use these constraints as…

In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as…