Related papers: Perceptive Locomotion through Nonlinear Model Pred…
Although bipedal locomotion provides the ability to traverse unstructured environments, it requires careful planning and control to safely walk across without falling. This poses an integrated challenge for the robot to perceive, plan, and…
Legged robot locomotion requires the planning of stable reference trajectories, especially while traversing uneven terrain. The proposed trajectory optimization framework is capable of generating dynamically stable base and footstep…
Performing highly agile dynamic motions, such as jumping or running on uneven stepping stones has remained a challenging problem in legged robot locomotion. This paper presents a framework that combines trajectory optimization and model…
To dynamically traverse challenging terrain, legged robots need to continually perceive and reason about upcoming features, adjust the locations and timings of future footfalls and leverage momentum strategically. We present a pipeline that…
This paper addresses the challenge of terrain-adaptive dynamic locomotion in humanoid robots, a problem traditionally tackled by optimization-based methods or reinforcement learning (RL). Optimization-based methods, such as model-predictive…
Computing stabilizing and optimal control actions for legged locomotion in real time is difficult due to the nonlinear, hybrid, and high dimensional nature of these robots. The hybrid nature of the system introduces a combination of…
This work developed a learning framework for perceptive legged locomotion that combines visual feedback, proprioceptive information, and active gait regulation of foot-ground contacts. The perception requires only one forward-facing camera…
We present a novel control strategy for dynamic legged locomotion in complex scenarios, that considers information about the morphology of the terrain in contexts when only on-board mapping and computation are available. The strategy is…
Real-time synthesis of legged locomotion maneuvers in challenging industrial settings is still an open problem, requiring simultaneous determination of footsteps locations several steps ahead while generating whole-body motions close to the…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
We study the problem of bipedal robot navigation in complex environments with uncertain and rough terrain. In particular, we consider a scenario in which the robot is expected to reach a desired goal location by traversing an environment…
We tackle the problem of perceptive locomotion in dynamic environments. In this problem, a quadrupedal robot must exhibit robust and agile walking behaviors in response to environmental clutter and moving obstacles. We present a…
Optimal control is a successful approach to generate motions for complex robots, in particular for legged locomotion. However, these techniques are often too slow to run in real time for model predictive control or one needs to drastically…
Terrain geometry is, in general, non-smooth, non-linear, non-convex, and, if perceived through a robot-centric visual unit, appears partially occluded and noisy. This work presents the complete control pipeline capable of handling the…
To proactively navigate and traverse various terrains, active use of visual perception becomes indispensable. We aim to investigate the feasibility and performance of using sparse visual observations to achieve perceptual locomotion over a…
Dynamic quadruped locomotion over challenging terrains with precise foot placements is a hard problem for both optimal control methods and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Non-linear solvers can produce coordinated constraint satisfying…
Simplified models are useful to increase the computational efficiency of a motion planning algorithm, but their lack of accuracy have to be managed. We propose two feasibility constraints to be included in a Single Rigid Body Dynamicsbased…
Legged robots that can operate autonomously in remote and hazardous environments will greatly increase opportunities for exploration into under-explored areas. Exteroceptive perception is crucial for fast and energy-efficient locomotion:…
When do locomotion controllers require reasoning about nonlinearities? In this work, we show that a whole-body model-predictive controller using a simple linear time-invariant approximation of the whole-body dynamics is able to execute…
Nonlinearity in dynamics has long been a major challenge in robotics, often causing significant performance degradation in existing control algorithms. For example, the navigation of bipedal robots can exhibit nonlinear behaviors even under…