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Many animals, modern aircraft, and underwater vehicles use streamlined body shapes that reduce fluid dynamic drag to achieve fast and effective locomotion in air and water. Similarly, numerous small terrestrial animals move through…
Legged robots are becoming increasingly powerful and popular in recent years for their potential to bring the mobility of autonomous agents to the next level. This work presents a deep reinforcement learning approach that learns a robust…
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…
Deep reinforcement learning has recently achieved strong results in quadrupedal locomotion, yet policies trained in simulation often fail to transfer when the environment changes. Evolutionary reinforcement learning aims to address this…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Locomotion is a prime example for adaptive behavior in animals and biological control principles have inspired control architectures for legged robots. While machine learning has been successfully applied to many tasks in recent years, Deep…
Nature has always inspired scientists and engineers to understand the underlying mechanism leading to optimal design in bio-inspired dynamics. This study presents a computational framework for optimizing undulatory swimming profiles using a…
Legged manipulators extend robotic capabilities beyond static manipulation by integrating agile locomotion with versatile arm control. However, achieving precise manipulation while maintaining coordinated locomotion remains a major…
Developing natural and diverse locomotion controllers for quadruped robots that can adapt to complex terrains while preserving motion style remains a significant challenge. Existing imitation-based methods face a fundamental optimization…
Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…
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…
Robust and energy-efficient bipedal locomotion in robotics is still a challenging topic. In order to address issues in this field, we can take inspiration from nature, by studying human locomotion. The Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…
The ability to modify morphology in response to environmental changes represents a highly advantageous feature in biological organisms, facilitating their adaptation to diverse environmental conditions. While some robots have the capability…
Rectilinear crawling locomotion is a primitive and common mode of locomotion in slender, soft-bodied animals. It requires coordinated contractions that propagate along a body that interacts frictionally with its environment. We propose a…
Recent advances in legged locomotion learning are still dominated by the utilization of geometric representations of the environment, limiting the robot's capability to respond to higher-level semantics such as human instructions. To…
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…
Traversing risky terrains with sparse footholds presents significant challenges for legged robots, requiring precise foot placement in safe areas. To acquire comprehensive exteroceptive information, prior studies have employed motion…
Enabling bipedal walking robots to learn how to maneuver over highly uneven, dynamically changing terrains is challenging due to the complexity of robot dynamics and interacted environments. Recent advancements in learning from…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…