Related papers: Structure design and coordinated motion analysis o…
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…
We address the problem of adapting robot trajectories to improve safety, comfort, and efficiency in human-robot collaborative tasks. To this end, we propose CoMOTO, a trajectory optimization framework that utilizes stochastic motion…
Modular robotics holds immense potential for space exploration, where reliability, repairability, and reusability are critical for cost-effective missions. Coordination between heterogeneous units is paramount for precision tasks -- whether…
Fish have endured millions of years of evolution, and their distinct rigid-flexible body structures offer inspiration for overcoming challenges in underwater robotics, such as limited mobility, high energy consumption, and adaptability.…
Soft materials have many important roles in animal locomotion and object manipulation. In robotic applications soft materials can store and release energy, absorb impacts, increase compliance and increase the range of possible shape…
Humanoid robots are promising to learn a diverse set of human-like locomotion behaviors, including standing up, walking, running, and jumping. However, existing methods predominantly require training independent policies for each skill,…
The automatic design of robots has existed for 30 years but has been constricted by serial non-differentiable design evaluations, premature convergence to simple bodies or clumsy behaviors, and a lack of sim2real transfer to physical…
While most insect-inspired robots come with a simple tarsus such as a hemispherical foot tip, insect legs have complex tarsal structures and claws, which enable them to walk on complex terrain. Their sharp claws can smoothly attach and…
Our goal in this work is to expand the theory and practice of robot locomotion by addressing critical challenges associated with the robotic biomimicry of bat aerial locomotion. Bats are known for their pronounced, fast wing articulations,…
Autonomous robots can transform how we observe marine ecosystems, but close-range operation in reefs and other cluttered habitats remains difficult. Vehicles must maneuver safely near animals and fragile structures while coping with…
Robotic platforms that can efficiently collaborate with humans in physical tasks constitute a major goal in robotics. However, many existing robotic platforms are either designed for social interaction or industrial object manipulation…
Legged robots are well-suited for broad exploration tasks in complex environments with yielding terrain. Understanding robotic foot-terrain interactions is critical for safe locomotion and walking efficiency for legged robots. This paper…
Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…
Trajectory optimization (TO) is one of the most powerful tools for generating feasible motions for humanoid robots. However, including uncertainties and stochasticity in the TO problem to generate robust motions can easily lead to…
Designing a mechanism to mimic the motion of a common house gecko is the objective of this work. The body of the robot is designed using four five-bar mechanisms (2-RRRRR and 2-RRPRR) and the leg is designed using four four-bar mechanisms.…
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…
Scaling the design of robots up or down remains a fundamental challenge. While biological systems follow well-established isometric and allometric scaling laws relating mass, stride frequency, velocity, and torque, it is unclear how these…
Humanoid robots are made to resemble humans but their locomotion abilities are far from ours in terms of agility and versatility. When humans walk on complex terrains, or face external disturbances, they combine a set of strategies,…
We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integrates the additional degrees of freedom introduced by the…
We present an integrated approach to locomotion and balancing of humanoid robots based on direct centroidal control. Our method uses a five-mass description of a humanoid. It generates whole-body motions from desired foot trajectories and…