Related papers: Impact-Aware Multi-Contact Balance Criteria

In unknown cluttered environments with densely stacked objects, the free-motion space is extremely barren, posing significant challenges to motion planners. Collision-free planning methods often suffer from catastrophic failures due to…

This manuscript presents a model of compliant contacts for time-critical humanoid robot motion control. The proposed model considers the environment as a continuum of spring-damper systems, which allows us to compute the equivalent contact…

High-speed and high-acceleration movements are inherently hard to control. Applying learning to the control of such motions on anthropomorphic robot arms can improve the accuracy of the control but might damage the system. The inherent…

During locomotion, legged robots interact with the ground by sequentially establishing and breaking contact. The interaction wrenches that arise from contact are used to steer the robot Center of Mass (CoM) and reject perturbations that…

For safe and effective operation of humanoid robots in human-populated environments, the problem of commanding a large number of Degrees of Freedom (DoF) while simultaneously considering dynamic obstacles and human proximity has still not…

Controlling contact forces during interactions is critical for locomotion and manipulation tasks. While sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL) has succeeded in many contact-rich problems, current RL methods achieve forceful interactions…

Learning from real-world robot demonstrations holds promise for interacting with complex real-world environments. However, the complexity and variability of interaction dynamics often cause purely positional controllers to struggle with…

Humanoid robots often face significant balance issues due to the motion of their heavy limbs. These challenges are particularly pronounced when attempting dynamic motion or operating in environments with irregular terrain. To address this…

Humans possess delicate dynamic balance mechanisms that enable them to maintain stability across diverse terrains and under extreme conditions. However, despite significant advances recently, existing locomotion algorithms for humanoid…

Legged robots have great potential to perform loco-manipulation tasks, yet it is challenging to keep the robot balanced while it interacts with the environment. In this paper we study the use of additional contact points for maximising the…

Direct physical interaction with robots is becoming increasingly important in flexible production scenarios, but robots without protective fences also pose a greater risk to the operator. In order to keep the risk potential low, relatively…

Reinforcement learning shows great potential to solve complex contact-rich robot manipulation tasks. However, the safety of using RL in the real world is a crucial problem, since unexpected dangerous collisions might happen when the RL…

While single-agent legged locomotion has witnessed remarkable progress, individual robots remain fundamentally constrained by physical actuation limits. To transcend these boundaries, we introduce Co-jump, a cooperative task where two…

Optimal control approaches in combination with trajectory optimization have recently proven to be a promising control strategy for legged robots. Computationally efficient and robust algorithms were derived using simplified models of the…

Robots built from soft materials will inherently apply lower environmental forces than their rigid counterparts, and therefore may be more suitable in sensitive settings with unintended contact. However, these robots' applied forces result…

Recently several hierarchical inverse dynamics controllers based on cascades of quadratic programs have been proposed for application on torque controlled robots. They have important theoretical benefits but have never been implemented on a…

This article propose a whole-body impedance coordinative control framework for a wheel-legged humanoid robot to achieve adaptability on complex terrains while maintaining robot upper body stability. The framework contains a bi-level control…

Achieving stable and robust perceptive locomotion for bipedal robots in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge due to complex terrain geometry and susceptibility to external disturbances. In this work, we propose a…

In complex scenarios where typical pick-and-place techniques are insufficient, often non-prehensile manipulation can ensure that a robot is able to fulfill its task. However, non-prehensile manipulation is challenging due to its…

Robotic manipulation research has investigated contact-rich problems and strategies that require robots to intentionally collide with their environment, to accomplish tasks that cannot be handled by traditional collision-free solutions. By…