Related papers: Optimal Gait Design for a Soft Quadruped Robot via…
Gaits and transitions are key components in legged locomotion. For legged robots, describing and reproducing gaits as well as transitions remain longstanding challenges. Reinforcement learning has become a powerful tool to formulate…
Typical legged locomotion controllers are designed or trained offline. This is in contrast to many animals, which are able to locomote at birth, and rapidly improve their locomotion skills with few real-world interactions. Such motor…
Real-world robots are becoming increasingly complex and commonly act in poorly understood environments where it is extremely challenging to model or learn their true dynamics. Therefore, it might be desirable to take a task-specific…
Legged robots, specifically quadrupeds, are becoming increasingly attractive for industrial applications such as inspection. However, to leave the laboratory and to become useful to an end user requires reliability in harsh conditions. From…
In this paper, with a view toward fast deployment of learned locomotion gaits in low-cost hardware, we generate a library of walking trajectories, namely, forward trot, backward trot, side-step, and turn in our custom-built quadruped robot,…
Recent advancements in soft actuators have enabled soft continuum swimming robots to achieve higher efficiency and more closely mimic the behaviors of real marine animals. However, optimizing the design and control of these soft continuum…
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…
In this paper, we present an efficient Dynamic Programing framework for optimal planning and control of legged robots. First we formulate this problem as an optimal control problem for switched systems. Then we propose a multi--level…
Trajectory optimization (TO) is one of the most powerful tools for generating feasible motions for humanoid robots. However, including uncertainties and stochasticity in the TO problem to generate robust motions can easily lead to an…
Rigid-bodied robots often lack compliance needed to adapt to unstructured environments, while fully soft robots, though highly adaptable, struggle with scalability and load capacity. In nature, musculoskeletal systems balance strength and…
We generalize the well-studied problem of gait learning in modular robots in two dimensions. Firstly, we address locomotion in a given target direction that goes beyond learning a typical undirected gait. Secondly, rather than studying one…
Robust closed-loop locomotion remains challenging for soft quadruped robots due to high-dimensional dynamics, actuator hysteresis, and difficult-to-model contact interactions, while conventional proprioception provides limited information…
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has seen many recent successes for quadruped robot control. The imitation of reference motions provides a simple and powerful prior for guiding solutions towards desired solutions without the need for meticulous…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
This work presents algorithms for the feedback-stabilised walking of bipedal humanoid robotic platforms, along with the underlying theoretical and sensorimotor frameworks required to achieve it. Bipedal walking is inherently complex and…
The adaptability of soft robots makes them ideal candidates to maneuver through unstructured environments. However, locomotion challenges arise due to complexities in modeling the body mechanics, actuation, and robot-environment dynamics.…
The hybrid zero dynamics (HZD) approach has become a powerful tool for the gait planning and control of bipedal robots. This paper aims to extend the HZD methods to address walking, ambling and trotting behaviors on a quadrupedal robot. We…
Bounding is one of the important gaits in quadrupedal locomotion for negotiating obstacles. The authors proposed an effective approach that can learn robust bounding gaits more efficiently despite its large variation in dynamic body…
This study explores the dynamics of asymmetrical bounding gaits in quadrupedal robots, focusing on the integration of torso pitching and hip motion to enhance speed and stability. Traditional control strategies often enforce a fixed…
Wheeled-legged robots have the potential for highly agile and versatile locomotion. The combination of legs and wheels might be a solution for any real-world application requiring rapid, and long-distance mobility skills on challenging…