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Legged robots can outperform wheeled machines for most navigation tasks across unknown and rough terrains. For such tasks, visual feedback is a fundamental asset to provide robots with terrain-awareness. However, robust dynamic locomotion…

Legged robots can traverse challenging terrain, use perception to plan their safe foothold positions, and navigate the environment. Such unique mobility capabilities make these platforms a perfect candidate for scenarios such as search and…

This paper addresses the problem of mobile grasping in dynamic, unknown environments where a robot must operate under a limited field-of-view. The fundamental challenge is the inherent trade-off between ``seeing'' around to reduce…

Dynamic locomotion in rough terrain requires accurate foot placement, collision avoidance, and planning of the underactuated dynamics of the system. Reliably optimizing for such motions and interactions in the presence of imperfect and…

Randomness is common in biological and artificial systems, resulting either from stochasticity of the environment or noise in organisms or devices themselves. In locomotor control, randomness is typically considered a nuisance. For example,…

Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…

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…

Learning-based approaches have recently shown notable success in legged locomotion. However, these approaches often lack accountability, necessitating empirical tests to determine their effectiveness. In this work, we are interested in…

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…

Detecting and localizing contacts is essential for robot manipulators to perform contact-rich tasks in unstructured environments. While robot skins can localize contacts on the surface of robot arms, these sensors are not yet robust or…

This paper considers the motion planning problem for multiple tethered planar mobile robots. Each robot is attached to a fixed base by a flexible cable. Since the robots share a common workspace, the interactions amongst the robots, cables,…

Quadruped robots have shown remarkable mobility on various terrains through reinforcement learning. Yet, in the presence of sparse footholds and risky terrains such as stepping stones and balance beams, which require precise foot placement…

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…

Step adjustment can improve the gait robustness of biped robots, however the adaptation of step timing is often neglected as it gives rise to non-convex problems when optimized over several footsteps. In this paper, we argue that it is not…

Quadruped robots are showing impressive abilities to navigate the real world. If they are to become more integrated into society, social trust in interactions with humans will become increasingly important. Additionally, robots will need to…

Proximity perception is a technology that has the potential to play an essential role in the future of robotics. It can fulfill the promise of safe, robust, and autonomous systems in industry and everyday life, alongside humans, as well as…

As robots leave the controlled environments of factories to autonomously function in more complex, natural environments, they will have to respond to the inevitable fact that they will become damaged. However, while animals can quickly…

Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…

Multi-legged robots offer enhanced stability to navigate complex terrains with their multiple legs interacting with the environment. However, how to effectively coordinate the multiple legs in a larger action exploration space to generate…

Recently, work on reinforcement learning (RL) for bipedal robots has successfully learned controllers for a variety of dynamic gaits with robust sim-to-real demonstrations. In order to maintain balance, the learned controllers have full…