Related papers: Quadrupedal Footstep Planning using Learned Motion…
Humans are able to negotiate downstep behaviors -- both planned and unplanned -- with remarkable agility and ease. The goal of this paper is to systematically study the translation of this human behavior to bipedal walking robots, even if…
Parkour tasks for quadrupeds have emerged as a promising benchmark for agile locomotion. While human athletes can effectively perceive environmental characteristics to select appropriate footholds for obstacle traversal, endowing legged…
Locomotion on dynamic rigid surface (i.e., rigid surface accelerating in an inertial frame) presents complex challenges for controller design, which are essential for deploying humanoid robots in dynamic real-world environments such as…
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
In this paper, we propose a footstep planning strategy based on model predictive control (MPC) that enables robust regulation of body orientation against undesired body rotations by optimizing footstep placement. Model-based locomotion…
Quadruped robots demonstrate robust and agile movements in various terrains; however, their navigation autonomy is still insufficient. One of the challenges is that the motion capabilities of the quadruped robot are anisotropic along…
This paper presents a hierarchical control framework that enables robust quadrupedal locomotion on a dynamic rigid surface (DRS) with general and unknown vertical motions. The key novelty of the framework lies in its higher layer, which is…
Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…
Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capabilities. Traditional methods, which assume simplified…
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…
Stabilizing legged robot locomotion on a dynamic rigid surface (DRS) (i.e., rigid surface that moves in the inertial frame) is a complex planning and control problem. The complexity arises due to the hybrid nonlinear walking dynamics…
Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…
When do locomotion controllers require reasoning about nonlinearities? In this work, we show that a whole-body model-predictive controller using a simple linear time-invariant approximation of the whole-body dynamics is able to execute…
Generating dynamic jumping motions on legged robots remains a challenging control problem as the full flight phase and large landing impact are expected. Compared to quadrupedal robots or other multi-legged robots, bipedal robots place…
Quadruped platforms have become an active topic of research due to their high mobility and traversability in rough terrain. However, it is highly challenging to determine whether the clattered environment could be passed by the robot and…
This study presents a theoretical framework for planning and controlling agile bipedal locomotion based on robustly tracking a set of non-periodic apex states. Based on the prismatic inverted pendulum model, we formulate a hybrid…
In this work, we introduce a control framework that combines model-based footstep planning with Reinforcement Learning (RL), leveraging desired footstep patterns derived from the Linear Inverted Pendulum (LIP) dynamics. Utilizing the LIP…
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 enormous potential in their range of capabilities, from navigating unstructured terrains to high-speed running. However, designing robust controllers for highly agile dynamic motions remains a substantial challenge for…
Planning the motion for humanoid robots is a computationally-complex task due to the high dimensionality of the system. Thus, a common approach is to first plan in the low-dimensional space induced by the robot's feet---a task referred to…