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Autonomous underwater robots are increasingly deployed for environmental monitoring, infrastructure inspection, subsea resource exploration, and long-horizon exploration. Yet, despite rapid advances in learning-based planning and control,…
The challenge of robotic reproduction -- making of new robots by recombining two existing ones -- has been recently cracked and physically evolving robot systems have come within reach. Here we address the next big hurdle: producing an…
Bio-inspired walking hexapod robots are a relatively young branch in robotics in both state of the art and applications. Despite their high degree of flexibility and adaptability derived by their redundant design, the research field that…
Traditional one-step preview planning algorithms for bipedal locomotion struggle to generate viable gaits when walking across terrains with restricted footholds, such as stepping stones. To overcome such limitations, this paper introduces a…
Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically expand the operational domains of robotics. However,…
Dissipative environments are ubiquitous in nature, from microscopic swimmers in low-Reynolds-number fluids to macroscopic animals in frictional media. In this study, motivated by various behaviours of {\it Caenorhabditis elegans} during…
High resolution tactile sensing has great potential in autonomous mobile robotics, particularly for legged robots. One particular area where it has significant promise is the traversal of challenging, varied terrain. Depending on whether an…
Humans possess delicate dynamic balance mechanisms that enable them to maintain stability across diverse terrains and under extreme conditions. However, despite significant advances recently, existing locomotion algorithms for humanoid…
Reproducing the diverse and agile locomotion skills of animals has been a longstanding challenge in robotics. While manually-designed controllers have been able to emulate many complex behaviors, building such controllers involves a…
Locomotion has seen dramatic progress for walking or running across challenging terrains. However, robotic quadrupeds are still far behind their biological counterparts, such as dogs, which display a variety of agile skills and can use the…
Robots "in-the-wild" encounter and must traverse widely varying terrain, ranging from solid ground to granular materials like sand to full liquids. Numerous approaches exist, including wheeled and legged robots, each excelling in specific…
Autonomous mobile robots need to perceive the environments with their onboard sensors (e.g., LiDARs and RGB cameras) and then make appropriate navigation decisions. In order to navigate human-inhabited public spaces, such a navigation task…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This paper presents a deformable…
Which kind of complex behavior may arise from self-organizing principles? We investigate this question for the case of snake-like robots composed of passively coupled segments, with every segment containing two wheels actuated separately by…
Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores…
We empirically demonstrate that a transformer pre-trained on country-scale unlabeled human mobility data learns embeddings capable, through fine-tuning, of developing a deep understanding of the target geography and its corresponding…
A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…
The environments in which the collaboration of a robot would be the most helpful to a person are frequently uncontrolled and cluttered with many objects present. Legible robot arm motion is crucial in tasks like these in order to avoid…
We present the modeling, design, fabrication and feedback control of an earthworm-inspired soft robot capable of crawling on surfaces by actively manipulating the frictional force between its body and the surface. Earthworms are segmented…
Robots excel at avoiding obstacles but struggle to traverse complex 3-D terrain with cluttered large obstacles. By contrast, insects like cockroaches excel at doing so. Recent research in our lab elucidated how locomotor transitions emerge…