Related papers: Selecting Mechanical Parameters of a Monopode Jump…

The process of robot design is a complex task and the majority of design decisions are still based on human intuition or tedious manual tuning. A more informed way of facing this task is computational design methods where design parameters…

Legged robots are physically capable of traversing a wide range of challenging environments, but designing controllers that are sufficiently robust to handle this diversity has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Reinforcement…

Several earlier studies have shown impressive control performance in complex robotic systems by designing the controller using a neural network and training it with model-free reinforcement learning. However, these outstanding controllers…

Numerous locomotion controllers have been designed based on Reinforcement Learning (RL) to facilitate blind quadrupedal locomotion traversing challenging terrains. Nevertheless, locomotion control is still a challenging task for quadruped…

Model-based approaches for planning and control for bipedal locomotion have a long history of success. It can provide stability and safety guarantees while being effective in accomplishing many locomotion tasks. Model-free reinforcement…

In this work, we consider the complex control problem of making a monopod reach a target with a jump. The monopod can jump in any direction and the terrain underneath its foot can be uneven. This is a template of a much larger class of…

Legged robots must exhibit robust and agile locomotion across diverse, unstructured terrains, a challenge exacerbated under blind locomotion settings where terrain information is unavailable. This work introduces a hierarchical…

Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…

Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…

Climbing, crouching, bridging gaps, and walking up stairs are just a few of the advantages that quadruped robots have over wheeled robots, making them more suitable for navigating rough and unstructured terrain. However, executing such…

The physical design of a robot and the policy that controls its motion are inherently coupled, and should be determined according to the task and environment. In an increasing number of applications, data-driven and learning-based…

Robotic loco-manipulation tasks often involve contact-rich interactions with the environment, requiring the joint modeling of contact force and robot position. However, recent visuomotor policies often focus solely on learning position or…

Humanoid robots, with their human-like morphology, hold great potential for industrial applications. However, existing loco-manipulation methods primarily focus on dexterous manipulation, falling short of the combined requirements for…

In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning-based algorithm for trajectory optimization for constrained dynamical systems. This problem is motivated by the fact that for most robotic systems, the dynamics may not always be known.…

Modular robots can be reconfigured to create a variety of designs from a small set of components. But constructing a robot's hardware on its own is not enough -- each robot needs a controller. One could create controllers for some designs…

Modern quadrupeds are skillful in traversing or even sprinting on uneven terrains in a remote uncontrolled environment. However, survival in the wild requires not only maneuverability, but also the ability to handle potential critical…

Legged locomotion in unstructured environments demands not only high-performance control policies but also formal guarantees to ensure robustness under perturbations. Control methods often require carefully designed reference trajectories,…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in legged locomotion over various challenging environments. However, due to the sim-to-real gap and lack of explainability, unconstrained RL policies deployed in the real…

Navigating rugged landscapes poses significant challenges for legged locomotion. Multi-legged robots (those with 6 and greater) offer a promising solution for such terrains, largely due to their inherent high static stability, resulting…

Legged robots have enormous potential in their range of capabilities, from navigating unstructured terrains to high-speed running. However, designing robust controllers for highly agile dynamic motions remains a substantial challenge for…