Related papers: Design and Control of a High-Performance Hopping R…
Small animals and robots must often rapidly traverse large bump-like obstacles when moving through complex 3-D terrains, during which, in addition to leg-ground contact, their body inevitably comes into physical contact with the obstacles.…
Hybrid driving-stepping locomotion is an effective approach for navigating in a variety of environments. Long, sufficiently even distances can be quickly covered by driving while obstacles can be overcome by stepping. Our quadruped robot…
Quadruped robots are often designed with rigid feet to simplify control and maintain stable contact during locomotion. While this approach is straightforward, it limits the ability of the legs to absorb impact forces and reuse stored…
Jumping is essential for legged robots to traverse through difficult terrains. In this work, we propose a hierarchical framework that combines optimal control and reinforcement learning to learn continuous jumping motions for quadrupedal…
Quadrupedal animals can perform agile and playful tasks while interacting with real-world objects. For instance, a trained dog can track and catch a flying frisbee before it touches the ground, while a cat left alone at home may leap to…
Aerial robots the size of a honeybee (~100 mg) have advantages over larger robots because of their small size, low mass and low materials cost. Previous iterations have demonstrated controlled flight but were difficult to fabricate because…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Planning locomotion trajectories for legged microrobots is challenging because of their complex morphology, high frequency passive dynamics, and discontinuous contact interactions with their environment. Consequently, such research is often…
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…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
We present a rolling and jumping underactuated monopedal robot designed to explore multimodal locomotion on low-gravity bodies. It uses only two reaction wheels to control its spatial orientation with two controllers: a balancing controller…
Exploring bodies of water on their surface allows robots to efficiently communicate and harvest energy from the sun. On the water surface, however, robots often face highly unstructured environments, cluttered with plant matter, animals,…
In this paper, we present a novel rolling, jumping robot. The robot consists of a driven pendulum mounted to a wheel in a compact, lightweight, 3D printed design. We show that by driving the pendulum to shift the robot's weight…
Robots have been critical instruments to space exploration by providing access to environments beyond human limitations. Jumping robot concepts are attractive solutions to negotiate complex terrain. However, among the engineering challenges…
Multi-modal robots expand their operations from one working medium to another, land to air for example. The majorities of multi-modal robots mainly refer to platforms that operate in two different media. However, for all-terrain tasks,…
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…
Performing highly agile dynamic motions, such as jumping or running on uneven stepping stones has remained a challenging problem in legged robot locomotion. This paper presents a framework that combines trajectory optimization and model…
This paper introduces HOPPY, an open-source, low-cost, robust, and modular kit for robotics education. The robot dynamically hops around a rotating gantry with a fixed base. The kit is intended to lower the entry barrier for studying…
Mobility on asteroids by multi-limbed climbing robots is expected to achieve our exploration goals in such challenging environments. We propose a mobility strategy to improve the locomotion safety of climbing robots in such harsh…
Advances in planetary robotics have led to wheeled robots that have beamed back invaluable science data from the surface of the Moon and Mars. However, these large wheeled robots are unable to access rugged environments such as cliffs,…