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Locomotion for legged robots poses considerable challenges when confronted by obstacles and adverse environments. Footstep planners are typically only designed for one mode of locomotion, but traversing unfavorable environments may require…
Achieving robust legged locomotion on complex terrains poses challenges due to the high uncertainty in robot-environment interactions. Recent advances in bipedal and quadrupedal robots demonstrate good mobility on rugged terrains but rely…
Planning whole-body motions while taking into account the terrain conditions is a challenging problem for legged robots since the terrain model might produce many local minima. Our coupled planning method uses stochastic and…
We present controllers that enable mobile robots to persistently monitor or sweep a changing environment. The changing environment is modeled as a field which grows in locations that are not within range of a robot, and decreases in…
Autonomous terrain traversal of articulated tracked robots can reduce operator cognitive load to enhance task efficiency and facilitate extensive deployment. We present a novel hybrid trajectory optimization method aimed at generating…
Stable gait generation is a crucial problem for legged robot locomotion as this impacts other critical performance factors such as, e.g. mobility over an uneven terrain and power consumption. Gait generation stability results from the…
Legged systems have many advantages when compared to their wheeled counterparts. For example, they can more easily navigate extreme, uneven terrain. However, there are disadvantages as well, particularly the difficulty seen in modeling the…
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…
Robust and flexible leader-following is a critical capability for robots to integrate into human society. While existing methods struggle to generalize to leaders of arbitrary form and often fail when the leader temporarily leaves the…
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…
Simplified models are useful to increase the computational efficiency of a motion planning algorithm, but their lack of accuracy have to be managed. We propose two feasibility constraints to be included in a Single Rigid Body Dynamicsbased…
This paper addresses autonomous racing by introducing a real-time nonlinear model predictive controller (NMPC) coupled with a moving horizon estimator (MHE). The racing problem is solved by an NMPC-based off-line trajectory planner that…
Dynamic locomotion of legged robots is a critical yet challenging topic in expanding the operational range of mobile robots. It requires precise planning when possible footholds are sparse, robustness against uncertainties and disturbances,…
In nature, animals with exceptional locomotion abilities, such as cougars, often possess asymmetric fore and hind legs. This observation inspired us: could optimizing the leg length of quadruped robots endow them with similar locomotive…
As a single-track mobile platform, bikebot (i.e., bicycle-based robot) has attractive navigation capability to pass through narrow, off-road terrain with high-speed and high-energy efficiency. However, running crossing step-like obstacles…
This paper formally develops a novel hierarchical planning and control framework for robust payload transportation by quadrupedal robots, integrating a model predictive control (MPC) algorithm with a gradient-descent-based adaptive updating…
Developing robust locomotion for humanoid robots is a complex task due to the unstable nature of these robots and also to the unpredictability of the terrain. A robust locomotion planner is one of the fundamental components for generating…
This paper introduces a novel trajectory planner for autonomous robots, specifically designed to enhance navigation by incorporating dynamic obstacle avoidance within the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS2) and Navigation 2 (Nav2) framework.…
Uncertain dynamic obstacles, such as pedestrians or vehicles, pose a major challenge for optimal robot navigation with safety guarantees. Previous work on motion planning has followed two main strategies to provide a safe bound on an…
Legged locomotion on deformable terrain is a challenging and open robo-physics problem since the uncertainty in terrain dynamics introduced by ground deformation complicates the dynamical modelling and control methods. Moreover, learning…