Related papers: Towards Hexapod Gait Adaptation using Enumerative …

Limitations in actuation, sensing, and computation have forced small legged robots to rely on carefully tuned, mechanically mediated leg trajectories for effective locomotion. Recent advances in manufacturing, however, have enabled the…

Legged robots can outperform wheeled machines for most navigation tasks across unknown and rough terrains. For such tasks, visual feedback is a fundamental asset to provide robots with terrain-awareness. However, robust dynamic locomotion…

This paper systematically decomposes a quadrupedal robot into bipeds to rapidly generate walking gaits and then recomposes these gaits to obtain quadrupedal locomotion. We begin by decomposing the full-order, nonlinear and hybrid dynamics…

Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…

Quadrupedal robots excel in mobility, navigating complex terrains with agility. However, their complex control systems present challenges that are still far from being fully addressed. In this paper, we introduce the use of Sample-Based…

Designing generalizable control policies for lower-limb exoskeletons remains fundamentally constrained by exhaustive data collection or iterative optimization procedures, which limit accessibility to clinical populations. To address this…

Dynamic maneuvers for legged robots present a difficult challenge due to the complex dynamics and contact constraints. This paper introduces a versatile trajectory optimization framework for continuous-time multi-phase problems. We…

Practical bipedal robot locomotion needs to be both energy efficient and robust to variability and uncertainty. In this paper, we build upon recent works in trajectory optimization for robot locomotion with two primary goals. First, we wish…

This paper proposes Gait Decomposition (G.D), a method of mathematically decomposing snake movements, and Gait Parameter Gradient (GPG), a method of optimizing decomposed gait parameters. G.D is a method that can express the snake gait…

Legged robots, specifically quadrupeds, are becoming increasingly attractive for industrial applications such as inspection. However, to leave the laboratory and to become useful to an end user requires reliability in harsh conditions. From…

Hexapod robots are potentially suitable for carrying out tasks in cluttered environments since they are stable, compact, and light weight. They also have multi-joint legs and variable height bodies that make them good candidates for tasks…

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…

Many robots move through the world by composing locomotion primitives like steps and turns. To do so well, robots need not have primitives that make intuitive sense to humans. This becomes of paramount importance when robots are damaged and…

Robot gait optimization is the task of generating an optimal control trajectory under various internal and external constraints. Given the high dimensions of control space, this problem is particularly challenging for multi-legged robots…

For a class of biped robots with impulsive dynamics and a non-empty set of passive gaits (unactuated, periodic motions of the biped model), we present a method for computing continuous families of locally optimal gaits with respect to a…

Spring-based actuators in legged locomotion provide energy-efficiency and improved performance, but increase the difficulty of controller design. While previous work has focused on extensive modeling and simulation to find optimal…

We present a framework for learning a single policy capable of producing all quadruped gaits and transitions. The framework consists of a policy trained with deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to modulate the parameters of a system of…

For legged robots to match the athletic capabilities of humans and animals, they must not only produce robust periodic walking and running, but also seamlessly switch between nominal locomotion gaits and more specialized transient…

Multi-legged robots offer enhanced stability to navigate complex terrains with their multiple legs interacting with the environment. However, how to effectively coordinate the multiple legs in a larger action exploration space to generate…

In this work we present a trajectory Optimization framework for whole-body motion planning through contacts. We demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied to automatically discover different gaits and dynamic motions on a…