Related papers: Locomotion as Manipulation with ReachBot
Lunar caves are promising features for long-term and permanent human presence on the moon. However, given their inaccessibility to imaging from survey satellites, the concrete environment within the underground cavities is not well known.…
Robot-aided exploration of planetary surfaces is essential for understanding geologic processes, yet many scientifically valuable regions, such as Martian dunes and lunar craters, remain hazardous due to loose, deformable regolith. We…
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying and rolling can overcome many roughness limitations and…
Advances in planetary robotics have led to wheeled robots that have beamed back invaluable science data from the surface of the Moon and Mars. However, these large wheeled robots are unable to access rugged environments such as cliffs,…
We present a method that finds locomanipulation plans that perform simultaneous locomotion and manipulation of objects for a desired end-effector trajectory. Key to our approach is to consider a generic locomotion constraint manifold that…
Mobility on asteroids by multi-limbed climbing robots is expected to achieve our exploration goals in such challenging environments. We propose a mobility strategy to improve the locomotion safety of climbing robots in such harsh…
Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning…
The allure of lunar surface exploration and development has recently captured widespread global attention. Robots have proved to be indispensable for exploring uncharted terrains, uncovering and leveraging local resources, and facilitating…
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,…
The potential of Martian lava tubes for resource extraction and habitat sheltering highlights the need for robots capable to undertake the grueling task of their exploration. Driven by this motivation, in this work we introduce a legged…
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…
Solving mobile manipulation tasks in inaccessible and dangerous environments is an important application of robots to support humans. Example domains are construction and maintenance of manned and unmanned stations on the moon and other…
In this paper we present a mission architecture and a robotic platform, the Shapeshifter, that allow multi-domain and redundant mobility on Saturn's moon Titan, and potentially other bodies with atmospheres. The Shapeshifter is a collection…
Human-Robot-Collaboration can enhance workflows by leveraging the mutual strengths of human operators and robots. Planning and understanding robot movements remain major challenges in this domain. This problem is prevalent in dynamic…
Despite the progress in legged robotic locomotion, autonomous navigation in unknown environments remains an open problem. Ideally, the navigation system utilizes the full potential of the robots' locomotion capabilities while operating…
Perceiving the surrounding environment is crucial for autonomous mobile robots. An elevation map provides a memory-efficient and simple yet powerful geometric representation for ground robots. The robots can use this information for…
In this work, we introduce a framework that enables highly maneuverable locomotion using non-periodic contacts. This task is challenging for traditional optimization and planning methods to handle due to difficulties in specifying contact…
Muddy terrains present significant challenges for terrestrial robots, as subtle changes in composition and water content can lead to large variations in substrate strength and force responses, causing the robot to slip or get stuck. This…
The interest in exploring planetary bodies for scientific investigation and in-situ resource utilization is ever-rising. Yet, many sites of interest are inaccessible to state-of-the-art planetary exploration robots because of the robots'…
Exploring and navigating in extreme environments, such as caves, oceans, and planetary bodies, are often too hazardous for humans, and as such, robots are possible surrogates. These robots are met with significant locomotion challenges that…