Related papers: Manipulator as a Tail: Promoting Dynamic Stability…
Understanding the gap between simulation and reality is critical for reinforcement learning with legged robots, which are largely trained in simulation. However, recent work has resulted in sometimes conflicting conclusions with regard to…
The spine plays a crucial role in the dynamic locomotion of quadrupedal animals, improving the stability, speed, and efficiency of their gait, especially for fast-paced and highly agile movements. Therefore, the spine is also a promising…
Humanoid robots that can autonomously operate in diverse environments have the potential to help address labour shortages in factories, assist elderly at homes, and colonize new planets. While classical controllers for humanoid robots have…
Humanoid robots, with their human-like morphology, hold great potential for industrial applications. However, existing loco-manipulation methods primarily focus on dexterous manipulation, falling short of the combined requirements for…
Modern Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms promise to solve difficult motor control problems directly from raw sensory inputs. Their attraction is due in part to the fact that they can represent a general class of methods that allow to…
Many people suffer from the loss of a limb. Learning to get by without an arm or hand can be very challenging, and existing prostheses do not yet fulfil the needs of individuals with amputations. One promising solution is to provide greater…
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…
Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured terrain. However, as planetary robots' power and thermal…
Loco-manipulation is a key capability for legged robots to perform practical mobile manipulation tasks, such as transporting and pushing objects, in real-world environments. However, learning robust loco-manipulation skills remains…
Robots will become ubiquitously useful only when they can use few attempts to teach themselves to perform different tasks, even with complex bodies and in dynamical environments. Vertebrates, in fact, successfully use trial-and-error to…
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…
Swing arms have an irreplaceable role in promoting highly dynamic locomotion on bipedal robots by a larger angular momentum control space from the viewpoint of biomechanics. Few bipedal robots utilize swing arms and its redundancy…
Deep reinforcement learning (RL) can enable robots to autonomously acquire complex behaviors, such as legged locomotion. However, RL in the real world is complicated by constraints on efficiency, safety, and overall training stability,…
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…
Simulation-based reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly advanced humanoid locomotion tasks, yet direct real-world RL from scratch or adapting from pretrained policies remains rare, limiting the full potential of humanoid robots.…
This chapter is about the fundamentals of fabrication, control, and human-robot interaction of a new type of collaborative robotic manipulators, called malleable robots, which are based on adjustable architectures of varying stiffness for…
The robustness of legged locomotion is crucial for quadrupedal robots in challenging terrains. Recently, Reinforcement Learning (RL) has shown promising results in legged locomotion and various methods try to integrate privileged…
The waist plays a crucial role in the agile movement of many animals in nature. It provides the torso with additional degrees of freedom and flexibility, inspiring researchers to incorporate this biological feature into robotic structures…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
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…