Related papers: Demonstrating a Robust Walking Algorithm for Under…
Whole-body control (WBC) is a generic task-oriented control method for feedback control of loco-manipulation behaviors in humanoid robots. The combination of WBC and model-based walking controllers has been widely utilized in various…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
In this paper, 3D humanoid walking is decoupled into periodic and transitional motion, each of which is decoupled into planar walking in the sagittal and lateral plane. Reduced order models (ROMs), i.e. actuated Spring-loaded Inverted…
Today's robotic quadruped systems can robustly walk over a diverse range of rough but continuous terrains, where the terrain elevation varies gradually. Locomotion on discontinuous terrains, such as those with gaps or obstacles, presents a…
Typically, learned robot controllers are trained via relatively unsystematic regimens and evaluated with coarse-grained outcome measures such as average cumulative reward. The typical approach is useful to compare learning algorithms but…
The kinematic features of a centaur-type humanoid platform, combined with a powerful actuation, enable the experimentation of a variety of agile and dynamic motions. However, the higher number of degrees-of-freedom and the increased weight…
Quadruped robots are designed to achieve agile and robust locomotion by drawing inspiration from legged animals. However, most existing control methods for quadruped robots lack a key capacity observed in animals: the ability to exhibit…
Experimental demonstration of complex robotic behaviors relies heavily on finding the correct controller gains. This painstaking process is often completed by a domain expert, requiring deep knowledge of the relationship between parameter…
This paper formally develops a novel hierarchical planning and control framework for robust payload transportation by quadrupedal robots, integrating a model predictive control (MPC) algorithm with a gradient-descent-based adaptive updating…
A safety-critical measure of legged locomotion performance is a robot's ability to track its desired time-varying position trajectory in an environment, which is herein termed as "global-position tracking". This paper introduces a nonlinear…
Accurate control of a humanoid robot's global position (i.e., its three-dimensional position in the world) is critical to the reliable execution of high-risk tasks such as avoiding collision with pedestrians in a crowded environment. This…
Safe navigation in real-time is an essential task for humanoid robots in real-world deployment. Since humanoid robots are inherently underactuated thanks to unilateral ground contacts, a path is considered safe if it is obstacle-free and…
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…
This paper presents a distributed inverse dynamics controller (DIDC) for quadruped robots that addresses the limitations of existing reactive controllers: simplified dynamical models, the inability to handle exact friction cone constraints,…
Bipedal locomotion skills are challenging to develop. Control strategies often use local linearization of the dynamics in conjunction with reduced-order abstractions to yield tractable solutions. In these model-based control strategies, the…
Dynamic walking on bipedal robots has evolved from an idea in science fiction to a practical reality. This is due to continued progress in three key areas: a mathematical understanding of locomotion, the computational ability to encode this…
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
We present a theoretical analysis of a recent whole body motion planning method, the Randomized Possibility Graph, which uses a high-level decomposition of the feasibility constraint manifold in order to rapidly find routes that may lead to…
Payload transport over flat terrain via multi-wheel robot carriers is well-understood, highly effective, and configurable. In this paper, our goal is to provide similar effectiveness and configurability for transport over rough terrain that…
While motion planning of locomotion for legged robots has shown great success, motion planning for legged robots with dexterous multi-finger grasping is not mature yet. We present an efficient motion planning framework for simultaneously…