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Contemporary robots have become exceptionally skilled at achieving specific tasks in structured environments. However, they often fail when faced with the limitless permutations of real-world unstructured environments. This motivates…
The human language is one of the most natural interfaces for humans to interact with robots. This paper presents a robot system that retrieves everyday objects with unconstrained natural language descriptions. A core issue for the system is…
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
Recent work on sim-to-real learning for bipedal locomotion has demonstrated new levels of robustness and agility over a variety of terrains. However, that work, and most prior bipedal locomotion work, have not considered locomotion under a…
Natural language offers an intuitive and flexible means for humans to communicate with the robots that we will increasingly work alongside in our homes and workplaces. Recent advancements have given rise to robots that are able to interpret…
A robot's ability to understand or ground natural language instructions is fundamentally tied to its knowledge about the surrounding world. We present an approach to grounding natural language utterances in the context of factual…
Agile locomotion in complex 3D environments requires robust spatial awareness to safely avoid diverse obstacles such as aerial clutter, uneven terrain, and dynamic agents. Depth-based perception approaches often struggle with sensor noise,…
Humans are able to negotiate downstep behaviors -- both planned and unplanned -- with remarkable agility and ease. The goal of this paper is to systematically study the translation of this human behavior to bipedal walking robots, even if…
Humanoid robots deployed in industrial environments are required to perform load-carrying transportation tasks that tightly couple locomotion and manipulation. However, achieving stable and robust locomotion under varying payloads and…
This extended abstract provides a short introduction on our recently developed perception-based controller for quadrupedal locomotion. Compared to our previous approach based on Visual Foothold Adaptation (VFA) and Model Predictive Control…
This work presents Neural Gaits, a method for learning dynamic walking gaits through the enforcement of set invariance that can be refined episodically using experimental data from the robot. We frame walking as a set invariance problem…
Exploring and traversing extreme terrain with surface robots is difficult, but highly desirable for many applications, including exploration of planetary surfaces, search and rescue, among others. For these applications, to ensure the robot…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to perform high-level planning. Yet, it remains a challenge for LLMs to comprehend low-level commands, such as joint angle targets or motor torques. This paper proposes an…
Generating dynamic motions for legged robots remains a challenging problem. While reinforcement learning has achieved notable success in various legged locomotion tasks, producing highly dynamic behaviors often requires extensive reward…
Limbless terrestrial animals exhibit exceptional locomotor versatility and control, currently unmatched by engineered counterparts. Here, we introduce a computational framework that enables soft synthetic snakes to navigate unstructured,…
In order for robots to operate effectively in homes and workplaces, they must be able to manipulate the articulated objects common within environments built for and by humans. Previous work learns kinematic models that prescribe this…
Recent work has shown results on learning navigation policies for idealized cylinder agents in simulation and transferring them to real wheeled robots. Deploying such navigation policies on legged robots can be challenging due to their…
Legged robots are able to navigate complex terrains by continuously interacting with the environment through careful selection of contact sequences and timings. However, the combinatorial nature behind contact planning hinders the…
Visual navigation by mobile robots is classically tackled through SLAM plus optimal planning, and more recently through end-to-end training of policies implemented as deep networks. While the former are often limited to waypoint planning,…
When working alongside human collaborators in dynamic and unstructured environments, such as disaster recovery or military operation, fast field adaptation is necessary for an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) to perform its duties or learn…