Related papers: Recent Approaches for Perceptive Legged Locomotion
Legged locomotion enables robotic systems to traverse extremely challenging terrains. In many real-world scenarios, the terrain is not that difficult and these mixed terrain types introduce the need for flexible use of different walking…
Dynamic walking on bipedal robots has evolved from an idea in science fiction to a practical reality. This is due to continued progress in three key areas: a mathematical understanding of locomotion, the computational ability to encode this…
Recent advances in legged locomotion learning are still dominated by the utilization of geometric representations of the environment, limiting the robot's capability to respond to higher-level semantics such as human instructions. To…
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…
Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores…
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…
Quadrupedal robots hold promising potential for applications in navigating cluttered environments with resilience akin to their animal counterparts. However, their floating base configuration makes them vulnerable to real-world…
Most locomotion methods for humanoid robots focus on leg-based gaits, yet natural bipeds frequently rely on hands, knees, and elbows to establish additional contacts for stability and support in complex environments. This paper introduces…
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…
Autonomous robots are currently one of the most popular Artificial Intelligence problems, having experienced significant advances in the last decade, from Self-driving cars and humanoids to delivery robots and drones. Part of the problem is…
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…
Humanoids are versatile robotic platforms owing to their limbs with multiple degrees of freedom. Although humanoids can walk like humans, they are relatively slow, and cannot run over large barriers. To address these limitations, we aim to…
Multi-legged robots offer enhanced stability in complex terrains, yet autonomously learning natural and robust motions in such environments remains challenging. Drawing inspiration from animals' progressive learning patterns, from simple to…
Sensorimotor contingency theory offers a promising account of the nature of perception, a topic rarely addressed in the robotics community. We propose a developmental framework to address the problem of the autonomous acquisition of…
Perceptive locomotion for legged robots requires anticipating and adapting to complex, dynamic environments. Model Predictive Control (MPC) serves as a strong baseline, providing interpretable motion planning with constraint enforcement,…
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…
Amphibious robots, operating seamlessly across land and water, are advancing applications in conservation, disaster response, and defense. Their performance depends on locomotion mechanisms, actuation technologies, and sensor-control…
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…
Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…
How are robots becoming smarter at interacting with their surroundings? Recent advances have reshaped how robots use tactile sensing to perceive and engage with the world. Tactile sensing is a game-changer, allowing robots to embed…