Related papers: On Safety Testing, Validation, and Characterizatio…
In this paper, we propose a locomotion training framework where a control policy and a state estimator are trained concurrently. The framework consists of a policy network which outputs the desired joint positions and a state estimation…
The ability to efficiently and effectively explore planetary surfaces is currently limited by the capability of wheeled rovers to traverse challenging terrains, and by pre-programmed data acquisition plans with limited in-situ flexibility.…
Safely controlling unknown dynamical systems is one of the biggest challenges in the field of control. Oftentimes, an approximate model of a system's dynamics exists which provides beneficial information for the selection of controls.…
The deployment of robots in industrial and civil scenarios is a viable solution to protect operators from danger and hazards. Shared autonomy is paramount to enable remote control of complex systems such as legged robots, allowing the…
Understanding the gap between simulation and reality is critical for reinforcement learning with legged robots, which are largely trained in simulation. However, recent work has resulted in sometimes conflicting conclusions with regard to…
Navigating in off-road environments for wheeled mobile robots is challenging due to dynamic and rugged terrain. Traditional physics-based stability metrics, such as Static Stability Margin (SSM) or Zero Moment Point (ZMP) require knowledge…
Navigating rugged landscapes poses significant challenges for legged locomotion. Multi-legged robots (those with 6 and greater) offer a promising solution for such terrains, largely due to their inherent high static stability, resulting…
Reproducing the diverse and agile locomotion skills of animals has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. While manually-designed controllers have been able to emulate many complex behaviors, building such controllers involves a…
Stability certificates play a critical role in ensuring the safety and reliability of robotic systems. However, deriving these certificates for complex, unknown systems has traditionally required explicit knowledge of system dynamics, often…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
Ensuring the safe and reliable operation of robotic systems is paramount to prevent potential disasters and safeguard human well-being. Despite rigorous design and engineering practices, these systems can still experience malfunctions,…
With an increasing use of data-driven models to control robotic systems, it has become important to develop a methodology for validating such models before they can be deployed to design a controller for the actual system. Specifically, it…
Legged locomotion is a challenging task for learning algorithms, especially when the task requires a diverse set of primitive behaviors. To solve these problems, we introduce a hierarchical framework to automatically decompose complex…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
Autonomous robots deployed in shared human environments, such as agricultural settings, require rigorous safety assurance to meet both functional reliability and regulatory compliance. These systems must operate in dynamic, unstructured…
Simulation has played an important role in efficiently evaluating self-driving vehicles in terms of scalability. Existing methods mostly rely on heuristic-based simulation, where traffic participants follow certain human-encoded rules that…
We address the problem of safely learning controlled stochastic dynamics from discrete-time trajectory observations, ensuring system trajectories remain within predefined safe regions during both training and deployment. Safety-critical…
This paper tackles the problem of integrated task and kinodynamic motion planning in uncertain environments. We consider a robot with nonlinear dynamics tasked with a Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces ($\ltlf$) specification…
Ensuring human safety in collaborative robotics can compromise efficiency because traditional safety measures increase robot cycle time when human interaction is frequent. This paper proposes a safety-aware approach to mitigate efficiency…
The semantics of the environment, such as the terrain type and property, reveals important information for legged robots to adjust their behaviors. In this work, we present a framework that learns semantics-aware locomotion skills from…