Related papers: Gait design for limbless obstacle aided locomotion…
Traversing environments with arbitrary obstacles poses significant challenges for bipedal robots. In some cases, whole body motions may be necessary to maneuver around an obstacle, but most existing footstep planners can only select from a…
Motivated by a possible convergence of terrestrial limbless locomotion strategies ultimately determined by interfacial effects, we show how both 3D gait alterations and locomotory adaptations to heterogeneous terrains can be understood…
Object-goal navigation requires mobile robots to efficiently locate targets with visual and spatial information, yet existing methods struggle with generalization in unseen environments. Heuristic approaches with naive metrics fail in…
In biomechanics and robotics, elasticity plays a crucial role in enhancing locomotion efficiency and stability. Traditional approaches in legged robots often employ series elastic actuators (SEA) with discrete rigid components, which, while…
We generalize the well-studied problem of gait learning in modular robots in two dimensions. Firstly, we address locomotion in a given target direction that goes beyond learning a typical undirected gait. Secondly, rather than studying one…
Humanoid robots have demonstrated robust locomotion capabilities using Reinforcement Learning (RL)-based approaches. Further, to obtain human-like behaviors, existing methods integrate human motion-tracking or motion prior in the RL…
(Simplified Abstract) To accomplish breakthroughs in dynamic whole-body locomotion, legged robots have to be terrain aware. Terrain-Aware Locomotion (TAL) implies that the robot can perceive the terrain with its sensors, and can take…
Many robots move through the world by composing locomotion primitives like steps and turns. To do so well, robots need not have primitives that make intuitive sense to humans. This becomes of paramount importance when robots are damaged and…
Locomotion has seen dramatic progress for walking or running across challenging terrains. However, robotic quadrupeds are still far behind their biological counterparts, such as dogs, which display a variety of agile skills and can use the…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Biologically inspired algorithms for simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) such as RatSLAM have been shown to yield effective and robust robot navigation in both indoor and outdoor environments. One drawback however is the…
This paper presents a gait optimization and motion planning framework for a class of locomoting systems with mixed kinematic and dynamic properties. Using Lagrangian reduction and differential geometry, we derive a general dynamic model…
Navigating mobile robots through environments shared with humans is challenging. From the perspective of the robot, humans are dynamic obstacles that must be avoided. These obstacles make the collision-free space nonconvex, which leads to…
While undulatory swimming of elongate limbless robots has been extensively studied in open hydrodynamic environments, less research has been focused on limbless locomotion in complex, cluttered aquatic environments. Motivated by the concept…
Balancing oneself using the spine is a physiological alignment of the body posture in the most efficient manner by the muscular forces for mammals. For this reason, we can see many disabled quadruped animals can still stand or walk even…
Flying animals, such as bats, fly through their fluidic environment as they create air jets and form wake structures downstream of their flight path. Bats, in particular, dynamically morph their highly flexible and dexterous armwing to…
In nature, a variety of limbless locomotion patterns flourish from the small or basic life form (Escherichia coli, the amoeba, etc.) to the large or intelligent creatures (e.g., slugs, starfishes, earthworms, octopuses, jellyfishes, and…
In nature, limbless locomotion is adopted by a wide range of organisms at various length scales. Interestingly, undulatory, crawling and inching/looping gait constitutes a fundamental class of limbless locomotion and is often observed in…
The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…
Legged robots have demonstrated remarkable agility on rigid, stationary ground, but their locomotion reliability remains limited in non-inertial environments, where the supporting ground moves, tilts, or accelerates. Such conditions arise…