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Limitations in actuation, sensing, and computation have forced small legged robots to rely on carefully tuned, mechanically mediated leg trajectories for effective locomotion. Recent advances in manufacturing, however, have enabled the…
Children tend to be constantly exposed to technologies, such as smartphones, tablets, and gaming consoles, drawn by the interactive and visually stimulating nature of digital platforms. Thus, integrating the teaching process with…
Navigating a large-scaled robot in unknown and cluttered height-constrained environments is challenging. Not only is a fast and reliable planning algorithm required to go around obstacles, the robot should also be able to change its…
Accessibility is one of the most important features in the design of robots and their interfaces. This thesis proposes methods that improve the accessibility of robots for three different target audiences: consumers, researchers, and…
The selection of mobility modes for robot navigation consists of various trade-offs. Snake robots are ideal for traversing through constrained environments such as pipes, cluttered and rough terrain, whereas bipedal robots are more suited…
We present a highly reactive controller which enables bipedal robots to blindly walk over various kinds of uneven terrains while resisting pushes. The high level motion planner does fast online optimization for footstep locations and Center…
Pedestrian dynamics is an interdisciplinary field of research. Psychologists, sociologists, traffic engineers, physicists, mathematicians and computer scientists all strive to understand the dynamics of a moving crowd. In principle,…
As mobile robots become useful performing everyday tasks in complex real-world environments, they must be able to traverse a range of difficult terrain types such as stairs, stepping stones, gaps, jumps and narrow passages. This work…
In both animals and robots, locomotion capabilities are determined by the physical structure of the system. The majority of legged animals and robots are bilaterally symmetric, which facilitates locomotion with consistent headings and…
The objective of this work is to design a mechatronic bipedal robot with mobility in 3D environments. The designed robot has a total of six actuated degrees of freedom (DoF), each leg has two DoF located at the hip: one for…
Controlled execution of dynamic motions in quadrupedal robots, especially those with articulated soft bodies, presents a unique set of challenges that traditional methods struggle to address efficiently. In this study, we tackle these…
Achieving stable and robust perceptive locomotion for bipedal robots in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge due to complex terrain geometry and susceptibility to external disturbances. In this work, we propose a…
In this work, we introduce SPADE, a path planning framework designed for autonomous navigation in dynamic environments using 3D scene graphs. SPADE combines hierarchical path planning with local geometric awareness to enable collision-free…
Quadruped robots are designed to achieve agile and robust locomotion by drawing inspiration from legged animals. However, most existing control methods for quadruped robots lack a key capacity observed in animals: the ability to exhibit…
Bipedal locomotion is a phenomenon that still eludes a fundamental and concise mathematical understanding. Conceptual models that capture some relevant aspects of the process exist but their full explanatory power is not yet exhausted. In…
We present a unified gait-conditioned reinforcement learning framework that enables humanoid robots to perform standing, walking, running, and smooth transitions within a single recurrent policy. A compact reward routing mechanism…
Robotics is undergoing a significant transformation powered by advances in high-level control techniques based on machine learning, giving rise to the field of robot learning. Recent progress in robot learning has been accelerated by the…
AutoDRIVE is envisioned to be a comprehensive research platform for scaled autonomous vehicles. This work is a stepping-stone towards the greater goal of realizing such a research platform. Particularly, this work proposes a…
A safety-critical measure of legged locomotion performance is a robot's ability to track its desired time-varying position trajectory in an environment, which is herein termed as "global-position tracking". This paper introduces a nonlinear…
Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically expand the operational domains of robotics. However,…