Related papers: Swift progress for robots over complex terrain

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…

Learning instead of designing robot controllers can greatly reduce engineering effort required, while also emphasizing robustness. Despite considerable progress in simulation, applying learning directly in hardware is still challenging, in…

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…

Robot navigation traditionally relies on building an explicit map that is used to plan collision-free trajectories to a desired target. In deformable, complex terrain, using geometric-based approaches can fail to find a path due to…

Space exploration missions have seen use of increasingly sophisticated robotic systems with ever more autonomy. Deep learning promises to take this even a step further, and has applications for high-level tasks, like path planning, as well…

Soft robots show compliance and have infinite degrees of freedom. Thanks to these properties, such robots can be leveraged for surgery, rehabilitation, biomimetics, unstructured environment exploring, and industrial grippers. In this case,…

While guide dogs offer essential mobility assistance, their high cost, limited availability, and care requirements make them inaccessible to most blind or low vision (BLV) individuals. Recent advances in quadruped robots provide a scalable…

Animals learn to adapt speed of their movements to their capabilities and the environment they observe. Mobile robots should also demonstrate this ability to trade-off aggressiveness and safety for efficiently accomplishing tasks. The aim…

Autonomy for robots interacting with sand will enable a wide range of beneficial behaviors, from earth moving for construction and farming vehicles to navigating rough terrain for Mars rovers. The goal of this work is to shape sand into…

In this work, we aim to enable legged robots to learn how to interpret human social cues and produce appropriate behaviors through physical human guidance. However, learning through physical engagement can place a heavy burden on users when…

Quadruped robots are progressively being integrated into human environments. Despite the growing locomotion capabilities of quadrupedal robots, their interaction with objects in realistic scenes is still limited. While additional robotic…

Legged robots must adapt their gait to navigate unpredictable environments, a challenge that animals master with ease. However, most deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches to quadruped locomotion rely on a fixed gait, limiting…

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…

Developing machine intelligence abilities in robots and autonomous systems is an expensive and time consuming process. Existing solutions are tailored to specific applications and are harder to generalize. Furthermore, scarcity of training…

This work explores the potential of using differentiable simulation for learning quadruped locomotion. Differentiable simulation promises fast convergence and stable training by computing low-variance first-order gradients using robot…

It is often overlooked by roboticists when designing locomotion controllers for their legged machines, that energy consumption plays an important role in selecting the best gaits for locomotion at high speeds or over long distances. The…

Human-aware robot navigation promises a range of applications in which mobile robots bring versatile assistance to people in common human environments. While prior research has mostly focused on modeling pedestrians as independent,…

We investigated how a robot moving with different velocity profiles affects a person's perception of it when working together on a task. The two profiles are the common linear profile and a profile based on the animation principles of slow…

Robotic computing has reached a tipping point, with a myriad of robots (e.g., drones, self-driving cars, logistic robots) being widely applied in diverse scenarios. The continuous proliferation of robotics, however, critically depends on…

Humans are well-adept at navigating public spaces shared with others, where current autonomous mobile robots still struggle: while safely and efficiently reaching their goals, humans communicate their intentions and conform to unwritten…