Related papers: Visual Whole-Body Control for Legged Loco-Manipula…
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…
Human-robot collaborative tasks foresee interactions between humans and robots with various degrees of complexity. Specifically, for tasks which involve physical contact among the agents, challenges arise in the modelling and control of…
We propose a robust dynamic walking controller consisting of a dynamic locomotion planner, a reinforcement learning process for robustness, and a novel whole-body locomotion controller (WBLC). Previous approaches specify either the position…
Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments,…
This paper presents a novel approach for controlling humanoid robots to push heavy objects. The approach combines kinodynamics-based pose optimization and loco-manipulation model predictive control (MPC). The proposed pose optimization…
We construct a Virtual Kinematic Chain (VKC) that readily consolidates the kinematics of the mobile base, the arm, and the object to be manipulated in mobile manipulations. Accordingly, a mobile manipulation task is represented by altering…
We tackle the challenges of synthesizing versatile, physically simulated human motions for full-body object manipulation. Unlike prior methods that are focused on detailed motion tracking, trajectory following, or teleoperation, our…
Transferring human motion to a mobile robotic manipulator and ensuring safe physical human-robot interaction are crucial steps towards automating complex manipulation tasks in human-shared environments. In this work, we present a novel…
Pedipulation leverages the feet of legged robots for mobile manipulation, eliminating the need for dedicated robotic arms. While previous works have showcased blind and task-specific pedipulation skills, they fail to account for static and…
The remarkable progress of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has attracted increasing attention to extend them to physical entities like legged robot. This typically requires MLLMs to not only grasp multimodal understanding…
This paper studies the experimental comparison of two different whole-body control formulations for humanoid robots: inverse dynamics whole-body control (ID-WBC) and passivity-based whole-body control (PB-WBC). The two controllers…
When do locomotion controllers require reasoning about nonlinearities? In this work, we show that a whole-body model-predictive controller using a simple linear time-invariant approximation of the whole-body dynamics is able to execute…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
The cooperation of a pair of robot manipulators is required to manipulate a target object without any fixtures. The conventional control methods coordinate the end-effector pose of each manipulator with that of the other using their…
Quadruped-based mobile manipulation presents significant challenges in robotics due to the diversity of required skills, the extended task horizon, and partial observability. After presenting a multi-stage pick-and-place task as a succinct…
Machine learning is now playing important role in robotic object manipulation. In addition, force control is necessary for manipulating various objects to achieve robustness against perturbations of configurations and stiffness. The…
Wheeled bipedal robots (WBRs) have the capability to execute agile and versatile locomotion tasks. This paper focuses on improving the dynamic performance of WBRs through innovations in both hardware and software development. Inspired by…
In this paper, we introduce the humanoid robot DRACO 3 by providing a high-level description of its design and control. This robot features proximal actuation and mechanical artifacts to provide a high range of hip, knee and ankle motion.…
Whole-body control (WBC) has demonstrated significant advantages in complex interactive movements of high-dimensional robotic systems. However, when a robot is required to handle dynamic multi-contact combinations along a single kinematic…
Humanoid robots require both robust lower-body locomotion and precise upper-body manipulation. While recent Reinforcement Learning (RL) approaches provide whole-body loco-manipulation policies, they lack precise manipulation with high DoF…