Related papers: Impact Intensity Estimation of a Quadruped Robot w…

To perform complex tasks, robots must be able to interact with and manipulate their surroundings. One of the key challenges in accomplishing this is robust state estimation during physical interactions, where the state involves not only the…

Attaching a heavy payload to the wrist force/moment (F/M) sensor of a manipulator can cause conventional impedance controllers to fail in establishing the desired impedance due to the presence of non-contact forces; namely, the inertial and…

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…

Many applications require robots to move through complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles, such as self-driving, search and rescue, and extraterrestrial exploration. Although robots are already excellent at avoiding sparse obstacles, they…

Our goal is to send legged robots into challenging, unstructured terrains that wheeled systems cannot traverse. Moreover, precise estimation of the robot's position and orientation in rough terrain is especially difficult. To address this…

Wheeled bipedal robots are emerging as flexible platforms for field exploration. However, head instability induced by uneven terrain can degrade the accuracy of onboard sensors or damage fragile payloads. Existing research primarily focuses…

Controlling contact forces during interactions is critical for locomotion and manipulation tasks. While sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has succeeded in many contact-rich problems, current RL methods achieve forceful interactions…

We present a model-based framework for robot locomotion that achieves walking based on only 4.5 minutes (45,000 control steps) of data collected on a quadruped robot. To accurately model the robot's dynamics over a long horizon, we…

Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…

Tactile perception is an essential ability of intelligent robots in interaction with their surrounding environments. This perception as an intermediate level acts between sensation and action and has to be defined properly to generate…

Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots over their wheeled counterparts on rough and uneven…

We apply reinforcement learning (RL) to robotics tasks. One of the drawbacks of traditional RL algorithms has been their poor sample efficiency. One approach to improve the sample efficiency is model-based RL. In our model-based RL…

A simple approach to gyro and accelerometer bias estimation is proposed. It does not involve Kalman filtering or similar formal techniques. Instead, it is based on physical intuition and exploits a duality between gimbaled and strapdown…

This paper introduces an advanced Quaternion-based Unscented Kalman Filter (QUKF) for real-time, robust estimation of system states and external wrenches in assistive aerial payload transportation systems that engage in direct physical…

Industrial manipulators do not collapse under their own weight when powered off due to the friction in their joints. Although these mechanism are effective for stiff position control of pick-and-place, they are inappropriate for legged…

This work presents approaches for the estimation of quantities important for the control of the momentum of a humanoid robot. In contrast to previous approaches which use simplified models such as the Linear Inverted Pendulum Model, we…

Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…

We propose a novel state estimator for legged robots, STEP, achieved through a novel preintegrated foot velocity factor. In the preintegrated foot velocity factor, the usual non-slip assumption is not adopted. Instead, the end effector…

One of the most important object properties that humans and robots perceive through touch is hardness. This paper investigates information-theoretic active sampling strategies for sample-efficient hardness classification with vision-based…

We propose a method to tackle the problem of mapless collision-avoidance navigation where humans are present using 2D laser scans. Our proposed method uses ego-safety to measure collision from the robot's perspective while social-safety to…