Related papers: Recent progress in the physical principles of dyna…

This work addresses the coordination problem of multiple robots with the goal of finding specific hazardous targets in an unknown area and dealing with them cooperatively. The desired behaviour for the robotic system entails multiple…

Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…

Automatic fall recovery is a crucial prerequisite before humanoid robots can be reliably deployed. Hand-designing controllers for getting up is difficult because of the varied configurations a humanoid can end up in after a fall and the…

Providing mobile robots with the ability to manipulate objects has, despite decades of research, remained a challenging problem. The problem is approachable in constrained environments where there is ample prior knowledge of the environment…

In the last two decades the scientific community has shown a great interest in understanding and shaping the interaction mechanisms between humans and robots. The interaction implies communication between two dyadic agents and, if the type…

Learning is traditionally studied in biological or computational systems. The power of learning frameworks in solving hard inverse-problems provides an appealing case for the development of `physical learning' in which physical systems…

Following its success in natural language processing and computer vision, foundation models that are pre-trained on large-scale multi-task datasets have also shown great potential in robotics. However, most existing robot foundation models…

This paper studies the kinematic geometry of general 3-RPR planar parallel robots with actuated base joints. These robots, while largely overlooked, have simple direct kinematics and large singularity-free workspace. Furthermore, their…

The emergence of vision catalysed a pivotal evolutionary advancement, enabling organisms not only to perceive but also to interact intelligently with their environment. This transformation is mirrored by the evolution of robotic systems,…

It has been found that certain biological organisms, such as Erodium seeds and Scincus scincus, are capable of effectively and efficiently burying themselves in soil. Biological Organisms employ various locomotion modes, including coiling…

Dynamic bipedal robot locomotion has achieved remarkable success due in part to recent advances in trajectory generation and nonlinear control for stabilization. A key assumption utilized in both theory and experiments is that the robot's…

We consider a single kinematically controlled robot with a bounded control range. The robot travels in a two-dimensional region supporting an unknown unsteady scalar field. A single sensor provides the field value at the current location of…

Quadruped animals seamlessly transition between gaits as they change locomotion speeds. While the most widely accepted explanation for gait transitions is energy efficiency, there is no clear consensus on the determining factor, nor on the…

Existing learning approaches to dexterous manipulation use demonstrations or interactions with the environment to train black-box neural networks that provide little control over how the robot learns the skills or how it would perform post…

Cooperative transport is a striking phenomenon where multiple agents join forces to transit a payload too heavy for the individual. While social animals such as ants are routinely observed to coordinate transport at scale, reproducing the…

The Drosophila larva, a soft-body animal, can bend its body and roll efficiently to escape danger. However, contrary to common belief, this rolling motion is not driven by the imbalance of gravity and ground reaction forces. Through…

This work reports on developing a deep inverse reinforcement learning method for legged robots terrain traversability modeling that incorporates both exteroceptive and proprioceptive sensory data. Existing works use robot-agnostic…

The safety of mobile robots in dynamic environments is predicated on making sure that they do not collide with obstacles. In support of such safety arguments, we analyze and formally verify a series of increasingly powerful safety…

The heavy-load legged robot has strong load carrying capacity and can adapt to various unstructured terrains. But the large weight results in higher requirements for motion stability and environmental perception ability. In order to utilize…

Balancing oneself using the spine is a physiological alignment of the body posture in the most efficient manner by the muscular forces for mammals. For this reason, we can see many disabled quadruped animals can still stand or walk even…