Related papers: Gait design for limbless obstacle aided locomotion…
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…
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…
Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding…
Legged robots must adapt their gait to navigate unpredictable environments, a challenge that animals master with ease. However, most deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches to quadruped locomotion rely on a fixed gait, limiting…
Locomotion gaits are fundamental for control of soft terrestrial robots. However, synthesis of these gaits is challenging due to modeling of robot-environment interaction and lack of a mathematical framework. This work presents an…
Natural environments pose significant challenges for autonomous robot navigation, particularly due to their unstructured and ever-changing nature. Hiking trails, with their dynamic conditions influenced by weather, vegetation, and human…
Quadruped animals are capable of exhibiting a diverse range of locomotion gaits. While progress has been made in demonstrating such gaits on robots, current methods rely on motion priors, dynamics models, or other forms of extensive manual…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
This study focuses on the locomotion capability improvement in a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot through an online adaptive learning approach. Leveraging the inverse kinematics model of the soft quadruped robot, we employ a central…
We present Visual Navigation and Locomotion over obstacles (ViNL), which enables a quadrupedal robot to navigate unseen apartments while stepping over small obstacles that lie in its path (e.g., shoes, toys, cables), similar to how humans…
Robotic spacecraft have helped expand our reach for many planetary exploration missions. Most ground mobile planetary exploration robots use wheeled or modified wheeled platforms. Although extraordinarily successful at completing intended…
Similar to their counterparts in nature, the flexible bodies of snake-like robots enhance their movement capability and adaptability in diverse environments. However, this flexibility corresponds to a complex control task involving highly…
Learning multiple gaits is non-trivial for legged robots, especially when encountering different terrains and velocity commands. In this work, we present an end-to-end training framework for learning multiple gaits for quadruped robots,…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…
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…
Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait…
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
The design of gaits for robot locomotion can be a daunting process which requires significant expert knowledge and engineering. This process is even more challenging for robots that do not have an accurate physical model, such as compliant…
Mobile robots, especially those driving outdoors and in unstructured terrain, sometimes suffer from failures and errors in locomotion, like unevenly pressurized or flat tires, loose axes or de-tracked tracks. Those are errors that go…
Sidewinding, a locomotion strategy characterized by the coordination of lateral and vertical body undulations, is frequently observed in rattlesnakes and has been successfully reconstructed by limbless robotic systems for effective movement…