Related papers: Design and Central Pattern Generator Control of a …

A spherical robot consists of an externally spherical rigid body rolling on a two-dimensional surface, actuated by an auxiliary mechanism. For a class of actuation mechanisms, we derive a controller for the geometric center of the sphere to…

Recent years have seen a surge in commercially-available and affordable quadrupedal robots, with many of these platforms being actively used in research and industry. As the availability of legged robots grows, so does the need for…

This paper proposes a modular framework to generate robust biped locomotion using a tight coupling between an analytical walking approach and deep reinforcement learning. This framework is composed of six main modules which are…

This work proposes a force control strategy with prescribed transient performance for the legs of a wheel-legged robotic system to realize the posture adjustment on uneven roads. A dynamic model of the robotic system is established with the…

Terrain adaptation is an essential capability for a ground robot to effectively traverse unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments such as forests. However, the expected robot behaviors generated by terrain adaptation…

The need for fully autonomous mobile robots has surged over the past decade, with the imperative of ensuring safe navigation in a dynamic setting emerging as a primary challenge impeding advancements in this domain. In this paper, a Safety…

Wheeled robots are highly efficient in human living environments. However, conventional wheeled designs, with their limited degrees of freedom and constraints in robot configuration, struggle to simultaneously achieve stability,…

In the context of legged robots, adaptive behavior involves adaptive balancing and adaptive swing foot reflection. While adaptive balancing counteracts perturbations to the robot, adaptive swing foot reflection helps the robot to navigate…

Rhythmic gait patterns in animal locomotion are widely believed to be produced by a central pattern generator (CPG), a network of neurons that drives the muscle groups. In previous papers we have discussed how phase-synchronous signals can…

Model predictive control (MPC) combined with reduced-order template models has emerged as a powerful tool for trajectory optimization in dynamic legged locomotion. However, loco-manipulation tasks performed by legged robots introduce…

Capturability of a robot determines whether it is able to capture a robot within a number of steps. Current capturability analysis is based on stance leg dynamics, without taking adequate consideration on swing leg. In this paper, we…

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…

Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…

Model predictive control (MPC) has established itself as the primary methodology for constrained control, enabling general-purpose robot autonomy in diverse real-world scenarios. However, for most problems of interest, MPC relies on the…

With the research into development of quadruped robots picking up pace, learning based techniques are being explored for developing locomotion controllers for such robots. A key problem is to generate leg trajectories for continuously…

This paper introduces two field transportation robots. Both robots are equipped with transformable wheel-leg modules, which can smoothly switch between operation modes and can work in various challenging terrains. SWhegPro, with six…

When a big and heavy robot moves, it exerts large forces on the environment and on its own structure, its angular momentum can varysubstantially, and even the robot's structure can deform if there is a mechanical weakness. Under these…

We propose a mechanically simple and cheap design for a series elastic actuator with controllable stiffness. Such characteristics are necessary for animals for running, jumping, throwing, and manipulation, yet in robots, variable stiffness…

Voxel-based structures provide a modular, mechanically flexible periodic lattice which can be used as a soft robot through internal deformations. To engage these structures for robotic tasks, we use a finite element method to characterize…

This paper presents a novel modular robot system that can self-reconfigure to achieve omnidirectional movements for collaborative object transportation. Each robotic module is equipped with a steerable omni-wheel for navigation and is…