Related papers: Real-Time Locomotion on Soft Grounds With Dynamic …

Much current study of legged locomotion has rightly focused on foot traction forces, including on granular media. Future legged millirobots will need to go through terrain, such as brush or other vegetation, where the body contact forces…

Locomotion on granular slopes such as sand dunes remains a fundamental challenge for legged robots due to reduced shear strength and gravity-induced anisotropic yielding of granular media. Using a hexapedal robot on a tiltable granular bed,…

For robots to navigate safely and efficiently on soft, granular terrains, it is crucial to gather information about the terrain's mechanical properties, which directly affect locomotion performance. Recent research has developed robotic…

We present SoftSMPL, a learning-based method to model realistic soft-tissue dynamics as a function of body shape and motion. Datasets to learn such task are scarce and expensive to generate, which makes training models prone to overfitting.…

Motions of virtual characters in movies or video games are typically generated by recording actors using motion capturing methods. Animations generated this way often need postprocessing, such as improving the periodicity of cyclic…

This paper presents a novel contact-implicit trajectory optimization method using an analytically solvable contact model to enable planning of interactions with hard, soft, and slippery environments. Specifically, we propose a novel contact…

Adaptive morphogenetic robots adapt their morphology and control policies to meet changing tasks and environmental conditions. Many such systems leverage soft components, which enable shape morphing but also introduce simulation and control…

It is difficult to conduct training and evaluate workers' postural performance by using the actual job site environment due to safety concerns. Virtual reality (VR) provides an alternative to create immersive working environments without…

The capability of effectively moving on complex terrains such as sand and gravel can empower our robots to robustly operate in outdoor environments, and assist with critical tasks such as environment monitoring, search-and-rescue, and…

Motion style transfer changes the style of a motion while retaining its content and is useful in computer animations and games. Contact is an essential component of motion style transfer that should be controlled explicitly in order to…

Creating scenes for captured motions that achieve realistic human-scene interaction is crucial for 3D animation in movies or video games. As character motion is often captured in a blue-screened studio without real furniture or objects in…

We present an approach to robustly track the geometry of an object that deforms over time from a set of input point clouds captured from a single viewpoint. The deformations we consider are caused by applying forces to known locations on…

This paper presents a novel technique that allows for both computationally fast and sufficiently plausible simulation of vehicles with non-deformable tracks. The method is based on an effect we have called Contact Surface Motion. A…

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…

Differentiable simulators promise to improve sample efficiency in robot learning by providing analytic gradients of the system dynamics. Yet, their application to contact-rich tasks like locomotion is complicated by the inherently…

Many applications require robots to move through complex 3-D terrain with large obstacles, such as self-driving, search and rescue, and extraterrestrial exploration. Although robots are already excellent at avoiding sparse obstacles, they…

We investigate the sliding of objects on an inclined granular surface close to the avalanche threshold. Our experiments show that the stability is driven by the surface deformations. Heavy objects generate footprint-like deformations which…

The last several years have seen significant progress in using depth cameras for tracking articulated objects such as human bodies, hands, and robotic manipulators. Most approaches focus on tracking skeletal parameters of a fixed shape…

Real-time proprioception is a challenging problem for soft robots, which have almost infinite degrees-of-freedom in body deformation. When multiple actuators are used, it becomes more difficult as deformation can also occur on actuators…

Legged robots need to make contact with irregular surfaces, when operating in unstructured natural terrains. Representing and perceiving these areas to reason about potential contact between a robot and its surrounding environment, is still…