Related papers: Environment-Centric Learning Approach for Gait Syn…

Granular media (GM) present locomotor challenges for terrestrial and extraterrestrial devices because they can flow and solidify in response to localized intrusion of wheels, limbs, and bodies. While the development of airplanes and…

Soft robotics has emerged as a promising technology that holds great potential for various application areas. This is due to soft materials unique properties, including flexibility, safety, and shock absorption, among others. Despite many…

Geometric mechanics provides valuable insights into how biological and robotic systems use changes in shape to move by mechanically interacting with their environment. In high-friction environments it provides that the entire interaction is…

Soft robots, inspired by elephant trunks or octopus arms, offer extraordinary flexibility to bend, twist, and elongate in ways that rigid robots cannot. However, their motion planning remains a challenge, especially in cluttered…

Salamander-like quadruped robots are designed inspired by the skeletal structure of their biological counterparts. However, existing controllers cannot fully exploit these morphological features and largely rely on predefined gait patterns…

Multi-legged robots deployed in complex missions are susceptible to physical damage in their legs, impairing task performance and potentially compromising mission success. This letter presents a rapid, training-free damage recovery…

The human foot serves as the critical interface between the body and environment during locomotion. Existing musculoskeletal models typically oversimplify foot-ground contact mechanics, limiting their ability to accurately simulate human…

Legged robot locomotion is a challenging task due to a myriad of sub-problems, such as the hybrid dynamics of foot contact and the effects of the desired gait on the terrain. Accurate and efficient state estimation of the floating base and…

Wheeled-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheels with the versatility of legs, but face significant energy optimization challenges when navigating diverse environments. In this work, we present a hierarchical control framework that…

The objective assessment of gait kinematics is crucial in evaluating human movement, informing clinical decisions, and advancing rehabilitation and assistive technologies. Assessing gait symmetry, in particular, holds significant importance…

Soft robotic systems have gained widespread attention due to their inherent flexibility, adaptability, and safety, making them well-suited for varied applications. Among bioinspired designs, earthworm locomotion has been extensively studied…

The semantics of the environment, such as the terrain type and property, reveals important information for legged robots to adjust their behaviors. In this work, we present a framework that learns semantics-aware locomotion skills from…

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,…

Step adjustment for humanoid robots has been shown to improve robustness in gaits. However, step duration adaptation is often neglected in control strategies. In this paper, we propose an approach that combines both step location and timing…

We study the problem of realizing the full spectrum of bipedal locomotion on a real robot with sim-to-real reinforcement learning (RL). A key challenge of learning legged locomotion is describing different gaits, via reward functions, in a…

State-of-the-art perceptive Reinforcement Learning controllers for legged robots either (i) impose oscillator or IK-based gait priors that constrain the action space, add bias to the policy optimization and reduce adaptability across robot…

In this study, a chair-type asymmetric tripedal low-rigidity robot was designed based on the three-legged chair character in the movie "Suzume" and its gait was generated. Its body structure consists of three legs that are asymmetric to the…

In this work, we demonstrate robust walking in the bipedal robot Digit on uneven terrains by just learning a single linear policy. In particular, we propose a new control pipeline, wherein the high-level trajectory modulator shapes the…

Selecting robot design parameters can be challenging since these parameters are often coupled with the performance of the controller and, therefore, the resulting capabilities of the robot. This leads to a time-consuming and often expensive…

We present a model-based framework for robot locomotion that achieves walking based on only 4.5 minutes (45,000 control steps) of data collected on a quadruped robot. To accurately model the robot's dynamics over a long horizon, we…