Related papers: Real-Time Locomotion on Soft Grounds With Dynamic …
This thesis presents a unified modeling and simulation framework for analyzing sidewinding and tumbling locomotion of the COBRA snake robot across rigid, compliant, and granular terrains. A contact-implicit formulation is used to model…
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…
Virtual models of human gait, or digital twins, offer a promising solution for studying mobility without the need for labor-intensive data collection. However, challenges such as the sim-to-real gap and limited adaptability to diverse…
Tracking the ball is critical for video-based analysis of team sports. However, it is difficult, especially in low-resolution images, due to the small size of the ball, its speed that creates motion blur, and its often being occluded by…
Robotic manipulation of highly deformable cloth presents a promising opportunity to assist people with several daily tasks, such as washing dishes; folding laundry; or dressing, bathing, and hygiene assistance for individuals with severe…
Human motion is fundamentally driven by continuous physical interaction with the environment. Whether walking, running, or simply standing, the forces exchanged between our feet and the ground provide crucial insights for understanding and…
Dexterous manipulation requires careful reasoning over extrinsic contacts. The prevalence of deforming tools in human environments, the use of deformable sensors, and the increasing number of soft robots yields a need for approaches that…
It is important to understand how bipedal walkers balance and walk effectively on granular materials, such as sand and loose dirt, etc. This paper first presents a computational approach to obtain the motion and energy analysis of bipedal…
Many organisms, including various species of spiders and caterpillars, change their shape to switch gaits and adapt to different environments. Recent technological advances, ranging from stretchable circuits to highly deformable soft…
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,…
Movement is how people interact with and affect their environment. For realistic character animation, it is necessary to synthesize such interactions between virtual characters and their surroundings. Despite recent progress in character…
Soft bodies made from flexible and deformable materials are popular in many robotics applications, but their proprioceptive sensing has been a long-standing challenge. In other words, there has hardly been a method to measure and model the…
Collocated tactile sensing is a fundamental enabling technology for dexterous manipulation. However, deformable sensors introduce complex dynamics between the robot, grasped object, and environment that must be considered for fine…
While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology. Existing work has typically been tailored for particular environments or representations.…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
Effective locomotion in nature happens by transitioning across multiple modes (e.g., walk, run, climb). Despite this, far more mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion has been on how to generate and stabilize around…
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…
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…
Based on the convex force-motion polynomial model for quasi-static sliding, we derive the kinematic contact model to determine the contact modes and instantaneous object motion on a supporting surface given a position controlled…
Soft robots offer an alternative approach to manipulate inside the constrained space while maintaining the safe interaction with the external environment. Due to its adaptable compliance characteristic, external contact force can easily…