Related papers: Locomotion as Manipulation with ReachBot
We present in-hand manipulation tasks where a robot moves an object in grasp, maintains its external contact mode with the environment, and adjusts its in-hand pose simultaneously. The proposed manipulation task leads to complex contact…
Brachiation is a dynamic, coordinated swinging maneuver of body and arms used by monkeys and apes to move between branches. As a unique underactuated mode of locomotion, it is interesting to study from a robotics perspective since it can…
Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…
Establishing lunar infrastructure is paramount to long-term habitation on the Moon. To meet the demand for future lunar infrastructure development, we present CraterGrader, a novel system for autonomous robotic earthmoving tasks within…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
Quadruped robots have made significant advances in locomotion, extending their capabilities from controlled environments to real-world applications. Beyond movement, recent work has explored loco-manipulation using the legs to perform tasks…
Learning-based approaches have recently shown notable success in legged locomotion. However, these approaches often lack accountability, necessitating empirical tests to determine their effectiveness. In this work, we are interested in…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse highly constrained environments with agile maneuvers. However, planning such motions requires solving a highly challenging optimization problem with a mixture of continuous and discrete decision…
Despite the advancement in robotic grasping and dexterity through haptic information, affective social touch, such as handshaking or reassuring stroking, remains a major challenge in Human-Robot-Interaction. This position paper examines…
Recent advances of locomotion controllers utilizing deep reinforcement learning (RL) have yielded impressive results in terms of achieving rapid and robust locomotion across challenging terrain, such as rugged rocks, non-rigid ground, and…
Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the robot has to…
Some animals exhibit multi-modal locomotion capability to traverse a wide range of terrains and environments, such as amphibians that can swim and walk or birds that can fly and walk. This capability is extremely beneficial for expanding…
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…
Virtual reality (VR) is an important new technology that is fun-damentally changing the way people experience entertainment and education content. Due to the fact that most currently available VR products are one size fits all, the…
Interactive navigation is crucial in scenarios where proactively interacting with objects can yield shorter paths, thus significantly improving traversal efficiency. Existing methods primarily focus on using the robot body to relocate large…
The discovery of ice deposits in the permanently shadowed craters of the lunar North and South Pole Moon presents an important opportunity for In-Situ Resource Utilization. These ice deposits maybe the source for sustaining a lunar base or…
This paper presents an integrated system for performing precision harvesting missions using a legged harvester. Our harvester performs a challenging task of autonomous navigation and tree grabbing in a confined, GPS denied forest…
We study the problem of bipedal robot navigation in complex environments with uncertain and rough terrain. In particular, we consider a scenario in which the robot is expected to reach a desired goal location by traversing an environment…
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…
One of the open challenges in designing robots that operate successfully in the unpredictable human environment is how to make them able to predict what actions they can perform on objects, and what their effects will be, i.e., the ability…