Related papers: Robust Contact State Estimation in Humanoid Walkin…
For full-size humanoid robots, even with recent advances in reinforcement learning-based control, achieving reliable locomotion on complex terrains, such as long staircases, remains challenging. In such settings, limited perception,…
Hardness is among the most important attributes of an object that humans learn about through touch. However, approaches for robots to estimate hardness are limited, due to the lack of information provided by current tactile sensors. In this…
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…
Contact estimation is a key ability for limbed robots, where making and breaking contacts has a direct impact on state estimation and balance control. Existing approaches typically rely on gate-cycle priors or designated contact sensors. We…
Planning safe motions for legged robots requires sophisticated safety verification tools. However, designing such tools for such complex systems is challenging due to the nonlinear and high-dimensional nature of these systems' dynamics. In…
Physical human-robot interaction has been an area of interest for decades. Collaborative tasks, such as joint compliance, demand high-quality joint torque sensing. While external torque sensors are reliable, they come with the drawbacks of…
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…
Recent advances in deep reinforcement learning (RL) based techniques combined with training in simulation have offered a new approach to developing robust controllers for legged robots. However, the application of such approaches to real…
Previous humanoid robot research works treat the robot as a bipedal mobile manipulation platform, where only the feet and hands contact the environment. However, we humans use all body parts to interact with the world, e.g., we sit in…
In this work, we present a novel framework for on-line human gait stability prediction of the elderly users of an intelligent robotic rollator using Long Short Term Memory (LSTM) networks, fusing multimodal RGB-D and Laser Range Finder…
Human walking is a complex activity with a high level of cooperation and interaction between different systems in the body. Accurate detection of the phases of the gait in real-time is crucial to control lower-limb assistive devices like…
Legged locomotion benefits from embodied sensing, where perception emerges from the physical interaction between body and environment. We present a soft-surfaced, vision-based tactile foot sensor that endows a bipedal robot with a skin-like…
Gait event detection of the initial contact and toe off is essential for running gait analysis, allowing the derivation of parameters such as stance time. Heuristic-based methods exist to estimate these key gait events from tibial…
We propose a means of omni-directional contact detection using accelerometers instead of tactile sensors for object shape estimation using touch. Unlike tactile sensors, our contact-based detection method tends to induce a degree of…
The motion of robots and objects in our world is often highly dependent upon contact. When contact is expected but does not occur or when contact is not expected but does occur, robot behavior diverges from plan, often disastrously. This…
Attaining animal-like legged locomotion on rough outdoor terrain with sparse foothold affordances -a primary use-case for legs vs other forms of locomotion- is a largely open problem. New advancements in control and perception have enabled…
The use of a team of humanoid robots to collaborate in completing a task is an increasingly important field of research. One of the challenges in achieving collaboration, is mutual identification and tracking of the robots. This work…
One of the significant challenges in legged robotics is achieving accurate odometry using only onboard proprioceptive sensors. In this study, we present a complete leg odometry pipeline based on an Error-State EKF (ESEKF) that relies…
Robotics system for rehabilitation of movement disorders and motion assistance are gaining increased intention. In this scenario estimation of ground contact is an active area of research in robotics and healthcare. This article addresses…
State estimation for legged robots remains challenging because legged odometry generally suffers from limited observability and therefore depends critically on measurement constraints to suppress drift. When exteroceptive sensors are…