Related papers: Gait design for limbless obstacle aided locomotion…
Quadruped animals seamlessly transition between gaits as they change locomotion speeds. While the most widely accepted explanation for gait transitions is energy efficiency, there is no clear consensus on the determining factor, nor on the…
Hiking on complex trails demands balance, agility, and adaptive decision-making over unpredictable terrain. Current humanoid research remains fragmented and inadequate for hiking: locomotion focuses on motor skills without long-term goals…
Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…
Inertia-dominated mechanical systems can achieve net displacement by 1) periodically changing their shape (known as kinematic gait) and 2) adjusting their inertia distribution to utilize the existing nonzero net momentum (known as momentum…
This paper presents a gait controller for bipedal robots to achieve highly agile walking over various terrains given local slope and friction cone information. Without these considerations, untimely impacts can cause a robot to trip and…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
Wheeled robots are highly efficient in human living environments. However, conventional wheeled designs, with their limited degrees of freedom and constraints in robot configuration, struggle to simultaneously achieve stability,…
Discrete motion tokenization has recently enabled Large Language Models (LLMs) to serve as versatile backbones for motion understanding and motion-language reasoning. However, existing pipelines typically decouple motion quantization from…
Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to perform high-level planning. Yet, it remains a challenge for LLMs to comprehend low-level commands, such as joint angle targets or motor torques. This paper proposes an…
Autonomous wheeled-legged robots have the potential to transform logistics systems, improving operational efficiency and adaptability in urban environments. Navigating urban environments, however, poses unique challenges for robots,…
The agility of animals, particularly in complex activities such as running, turning, jumping, and backflipping, stands as an exemplar for robotic system design. Transferring this suite of behaviors to legged robotic systems introduces…
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…
In the context of legged robots, adaptive behavior involves adaptive balancing and adaptive swing foot reflection. While adaptive balancing counteracts perturbations to the robot, adaptive swing foot reflection helps the robot to navigate…
As a core part of autonomous driving systems, motion planning has received extensive attention from academia and industry. However, real-time trajectory planning capable of spatial-temporal joint optimization is challenged by nonholonomic…
Soft robotics aims to develop robots able to adapt their behavior across a wide range of unstructured and unknown environments. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that nonlinear dynamics often result in complex behaviors hard…
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…
Lower limbs exoskeletons provide assistance during standing, squatting, and walking. Gait dynamics, in particular, implies a change in the configuration of the device in terms of contact points, actuation, and system dynamics in general. In…
Accurate proprioceptive odometry is fundamental for legged robot navigation in GPS-denied and visually degraded environments where conventional visual odometry systems fail. Current approaches face critical limitations: analytical filtering…
We present a framework for learning a single policy capable of producing all quadruped gaits and transitions. The framework consists of a policy trained with deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to modulate the parameters of a system of…
Granular media (GM) present locomotor challenges for terrestrial and extraterrestrial devices because they can flow and solidify in response to localized intrusion of wheels, limbs, and bodies. While the development of airplanes and…