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This paper addresses the challenge of terrain-adaptive dynamic locomotion in humanoid robots, a problem traditionally tackled by optimization-based methods or reinforcement learning (RL). Optimization-based methods, such as model-predictive…

Granular materials are of critical interest to many robotic tasks in planetary science, construction, and manufacturing. However, the dynamics of granular materials are complex and often computationally very expensive to simulate. We…

Vision Language Models (VLMs) play a crucial role in robotic manipulation by enabling robots to understand and interpret the visual properties of objects and their surroundings, allowing them to perform manipulation based on this multimodal…

Soft, vine-inspired growing robots that move by eversion are highly mobile in confined environments, but, when faced with gaps in the environment, they may collapse under their own weight while navigating a desired path. In this work, we…

We propose a novel method for autonomous legged robot navigation in densely vegetated environments with a variety of pliable/traversable and non-pliable/untraversable vegetation. We present a novel few-shot learning classifier that can be…

Robotic grasping presents a difficult motor task in real-world scenarios, constituting a major hurdle to the deployment of capable robots across various industries. Notably, the scarcity of data makes grasping particularly challenging for…

Legged robots have demonstrated high efficiency and effectiveness in unstructured and dynamic environments. However, it is still challenging for legged robots to achieve rapid and efficient locomotion on deformable, yielding substrates,…

Robust humanoid locomotion requires accurate and globally consistent perception of the surrounding 3D environment. However, existing perception modules, mainly based on depth images or elevation maps, offer only partial and locally…

In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for a snake robot to move straight up a cylindrical surface. Prior works on pole-climbing for a snake robot mainly utilized a rolling helix gait, and although proven to be efficient, it does not…

The functional demands of robotic systems often require completing various tasks or behaviors under the effect of disturbances or uncertain environments. Of increasing interest is the autonomy for dynamic robots, such as multirotors, motor…

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…

Deep reinforcement learning produces robust locomotion policies for legged robots over challenging terrains. To date, few studies have leveraged model-based methods to combine these locomotion skills with the precise control of…

A generalist robot equipped with learned skills must be able to perform many tasks in many different environments. However, zero-shot generalization to new settings is not always possible. When the robot encounters a new environment or…

Legged robots, particularly quadrupeds, offer promising navigation capabilities, especially in scenarios requiring traversal over diverse terrains and obstacle avoidance. This paper addresses the challenge of enabling legged robots to…

The dynamical properties of tensegrity robots give them appealing ruggedness and adaptability, but present major challenges with respect to locomotion control. Due to high-dimensionality and complex contact responses, data-driven approaches…

Object manipulation has been extensively studied in the context of fixed base and mobile manipulators. However, the overactuated locomotion modality employed by snake robots allows for a unique blend of object manipulation through…

Using visual model-based learning for deformable object manipulation is challenging due to difficulties in learning plannable visual representations along with complex dynamic models. In this work, we propose a new learning framework that…

Objects rarely sit in isolation in human environments. As such, we'd like our robots to reason about how multiple objects relate to one another and how those relations may change as the robot interacts with the world. To this end, we…

Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…

Most conventional wheeled robots can only move in flat environments and simply divide their planar workspaces into free spaces and obstacles. Deeming obstacles as non-traversable significantly limits wheeled robots' mobility in real-world,…