Related papers: Demonstrating Autonomous 3D Path Planning on a Nov…

Efficient aerial data collection is important in many remote sensing applications. In large-scale monitoring scenarios, deploying a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers improved spatial coverage and robustness against individual…

Visually impaired people usually find it hard to travel independently in many public places such as airports and shopping malls due to the problems of obstacle avoidance and guidance to the desired location. Therefore, in the highly dynamic…

Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…

Humanoid robots hold great potential to perform various human-level skills, involving unified locomotion and manipulation in real-world settings. Driven by advances in machine learning and the strength of existing model-based approaches,…

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…

Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…

Legged robots have the potential to leverage obstacles to climb steep sand slopes. However, efficiently repositioning these obstacles to desired locations is challenging. Here we present DiffusiveGRAIN, a learning-based method that enables…

Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…

Legged robots face significant challenges in moving and navigating on deformable and highly yielding terrain such as mud. We present a resistive force model for legged foot-mud interactions. The model captures rheological behaviors such as…

Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait…

A robot guide dog has compelling advantages over animal guide dogs for its cost-effectiveness, potential for mass production, and low maintenance burden. However, despite the long history of guide dog robot research, previous studies were…

We present a large language model (LLM) based system to empower quadrupedal robots with problem-solving abilities for long-horizon tasks beyond short-term motions. Long-horizon tasks for quadrupeds are challenging since they require both a…

Robots operating in the real world will experience a range of different environments and tasks. It is essential for the robot to have the ability to adapt to its surroundings to work efficiently in changing conditions. Evolutionary robotics…

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…

If we give a robot the task of moving an object from its current position to another location in an unknown environment, the robot must explore the map, identify all types of obstacles, and then determine the best route to complete the…

This article introduces a multimodal motion planning (MMP) algorithm that combines three-dimensional (3-D) path planning and a DWA obstacle avoidance algorithm. The algorithms aim to plan the path and motion of obstacle-overcoming robots in…

Enabling robots to autonomously perform hybrid motions in diverse environments can be beneficial for long-horizon tasks such as material handling, household chores, and work assistance. This requires extensive exploitation of intrinsic…

This research focuses on enabling Northeastern University's Husky, a multi-modal quadrupedal robot, to navigate narrow paths akin to various animals in nature. The Husky is equipped with thrusters to stabilize its body during dynamic…

Truss robots are highly redundant parallel robotic systems that can be applied in a variety of scenarios. The variable topology truss (VTT) is a class of modular truss robots. As self-reconfigurable modular robots, a VTT is composed of many…

This paper addresses the challenge of terrain-adaptive dynamic locomotion in humanoid robots, a problem traditionally tackled by optimization-based methods or reinforcement learning (RL). Optimization-based methods, such as model-predictive…