Related papers: Geometry of contact: contact planning for multi-le…
Legged robot research is presently focused on bipedal or quadrupedal robots, despite capabilities to build robots with many more legs to potentially improve locomotion performance. This imbalance is not necessarily due to hardware…
Loco-manipulation planning skills are pivotal for expanding the utility of robots in everyday environments. These skills can be assessed based on a system's ability to coordinate complex holistic movements and multiple contact interactions…
In this work we present a trajectory Optimization framework for whole-body motion planning through contacts. We demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied to automatically discover different gaits and dynamic motions on a…
Traditional motion planning approaches for multi-legged locomotion divide the problem into several stages, such as contact search and trajectory generation. However, reasoning about contacts and motions simultaneously is crucial for the…
Humanoid robots rely on multi-contact planners to navigate a diverse set of environments, including those that are unstructured and highly constrained. To synthesize stable multi-contact plans within a reasonable time frame, most planners…
Legged robots are able to navigate complex terrains by continuously interacting with the environment through careful selection of contact sequences and timings. However, the combinatorial nature behind contact planning hinders the…
Serially connected robots are promising candidates for performing tasks in confined spaces such as search-and-rescue in large-scale disasters. Such robots are typically limbless, and we hypothesize that the addition of limbs could improve…
Planning locomotion trajectories for legged microrobots is challenging because of their complex morphology, high frequency passive dynamics, and discontinuous contact interactions with their environment. Consequently, such research is often…
Most animal and human locomotion behaviors for solving complex tasks involve dynamic motions and rich contact interaction. In fact, complex maneuvers need to consider dynamic movement and contact events at the same time. We present a…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse highly constrained environments with agile maneuvers. However, planning such motions requires solving a highly challenging optimization problem with a mixture of continuous and discrete decision…
Many robotics applications, from object manipulation to locomotion, require planning methods that are capable of handling the dynamics of contact. Trajectory optimization has been shown to be a viable approach that can be made to support…
While motion planning of locomotion for legged robots has shown great success, motion planning for legged robots with dexterous multi-finger grasping is not mature yet. We present an efficient motion planning framework for simultaneously…
Contact-rich problems, such as snake robot locomotion, offer unexplored yet rich opportunities for optimization-based trajectory and acyclic contact planning. So far, a substantial body of control research has focused on emulating snake…
Despite the great progress in quadrupedal robotics during the last decade, selecting good contacts (footholds) in highly uneven and cluttered environments still remains an open challenge. This paper builds upon a state-of-the-art approach,…
This paper explores an eclectic range of path-planning methodologies engineered for rolling surfaces. Our focus is on the kinematic intricacies of rolling contact systems, which are investigated through a motion planning lens. Beyond…
We present a novel method for global motion planning of robotic systems that interact with the environment through contacts. Our method directly handles the hybrid nature of such tasks using tools from convex optimization. We formulate the…
Humanoid robots dynamically navigate an environment by interacting with it via contact wrenches exerted at intermittent contact poses. Therefore, it is important to consider dynamics when planning a contact sequence. Traditional contact…
This paper presents a multi-contact motion adaptation framework that enables teleoperation of high degree-of-freedom (DoF) robots, such as quadrupeds and humanoids, for loco-manipulation tasks in multi-contact settings. Our proposed…
In this paper, we present an approach for generating a variety of whole-body motions for a humanoid robot. We extend the available Model Predictive Control (MPC) approaches for walking on flat terrain to plan for both vertical motion of the…
This paper presents a multi-contact approach to generalized humanoid fall mitigation planning that unifies inertial shaping, protective stepping, and hand contact strategies. The planner optimizes both the contact sequence and the robot…