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Motivated by a high demand for automated inspection of civil infrastructure, this work presents a new design and development of a tank-like robot for structural health monitoring. Unlike most existing magnetic wheeled mobile robot designs,…
Inspired by animals that co-adapt their brain and body to interact with the environment, we present a tendon-driven and over-actuated (i.e., n joint, n+1 actuators) bipedal robot that (i) exploits its backdrivable mechanical properties to…
Back injuries are the most prevalent work-related musculoskeletal disorders and represent a major cause of disability. Although innovations in wearable robots aim to alleviate this hazard, the majority of existing exoskeletons are obtrusive…
Legged robot locomotion on a dynamic rigid surface (i.e., a rigid surface moving in the inertial frame) involves complex full-order dynamics that is high-dimensional, nonlinear, and time-varying. Towards deriving an analytically tractable…
Quadruped robots are often designed with rigid feet to simplify control and maintain stable contact during locomotion. While this approach is straightforward, it limits the ability of the legs to absorb impact forces and reuse stored…
This paper presents a novel methodology to model and optimize trajectories of a quadrupedal robot with spinal compliance to improve standing jump performance compared to quadrupeds with a rigid spine. We introduce an elastic model for a…
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…
Robot feet are crucial for maintaining dynamic stability and propelling the body during walking, especially on uneven terrains. Traditionally, robot feet were mostly designed as flat and stiff pieces of metal, which meets its limitations…
Motion planning trajectories for a multi-limbed robot to climb up walls requires a unique combination of constraints on torque, contact force, and posture. This paper focuses on motion planning for one particular setup wherein a six-legged…
Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…
Legged locomotion is commonly studied and expressed as a discrete set of gait patterns, like walk, trot, gallop, which are usually treated as given and pre-programmed in legged robots for efficient locomotion at different speeds. However,…
In this work, we demonstrate robust walking in the bipedal robot Digit on uneven terrains by just learning a single linear policy. In particular, we propose a new control pipeline, wherein the high-level trajectory modulator shapes the…
Robots are becoming increasingly essential for traversing complex environments such as disaster areas, extraterrestrial terrains, and marine environments. Yet, their potential is often limited by mobility and adaptability constraints. In…
Quadruped robots are becoming increasingly essential for various applications, including industrial inspection and catastrophe search and rescue. These scenarios require robots to possess enhanced agility and obstacle-navigation skills.…
In this paper, we propose a robust controller that achieves natural and stably fast locomotion on a real blind quadruped robot. With only proprioceptive information, the quadruped robot can move at a maximum speed of 10 times its body…
Rescue missions in mountain environments are hardly achievable by standard legged robots-because of the high slopes-or by flying robots-because of limited payload capacity. We present a concept for a rope-aided climbing robot which can…
We focus on agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping of quadrupedal robots in discontinuous terrains such as stairs and stepping stones. Unlike single-step jumping, continuous jumping requires accurately executing highly dynamic…
Soft robotic snakes (SRSs) have a unique combination of continuous and compliant properties that allow them to imitate the complex movements of biological snakes. Despite the previous attempts to develop SRSs, many have been limited to…
This review considers a problem in the development of mobile robot adhesion methods with vertical surfaces and the appropriate locomotion mechanism design. The evolution of adhesion methods for wall-climbing robots (based on friction,…
We propose a robust dynamic walking controller consisting of a dynamic locomotion planner, a reinforcement learning process for robustness, and a novel whole-body locomotion controller (WBLC). Previous approaches specify either the position…