Related papers: Identifying Terrain Physical Parameters from Visio…
Controlling Wheeled-legged robots is challenging especially on slippery surfaces due to their dependence on continuous ground contact. Unlike quadrupeds or bipeds, which can leverage multiple fixed contact points for recovery,…
We present a novel autonomous robot navigation algorithm for outdoor environments that is capable of handling diverse terrain traversability conditions. Our approach, VLM-GroNav, uses vision-language models (VLMs) and integrates them with…
Reprogrammable mechanical metamaterials, composed of a lattice of discretely adaptive elements, are emerging as a promising platform for mechanical intelligence. To operate in unknown environments, such structures must go beyond passive…
Offroad vehicle movement has to contend with uneven and uncertain terrain which present challenges to path planning and motion control for both manned and unmanned ground vehicles. Knowledge of terrain properties can allow a vehicle to…
In contrast to quadruped robots that can navigate diverse terrains using a "blind" policy, humanoid robots require accurate perception for stable locomotion due to their high degrees of freedom and inherently unstable morphology. However,…
Off-road navigation is critical for a wide range of field robotics applications from planetary exploration to disaster response. However, it remains a longstanding challenge due to unstructured environments and the inherently complex…
In this paper, we give a double twist to the problem of planning under uncertainty. State-of-the-art planners seek to minimize the localization uncertainty by only considering the geometric structure of the scene. In this paper, we argue…
Mobile robots should be capable of planning cost-efficient paths for autonomous navigation. Typically, the terrain and robot properties are subject to variations. For instance, properties of the terrain such as friction may vary across…
Quadrupedal robots resemble the physical ability of legged animals to walk through unstructured terrains. However, designing a controller for quadrupedal robots poses a significant challenge due to their functional complexity and requires…
Animals are capable of precise and agile locomotion using vision. Replicating this ability has been a long-standing goal in robotics. The traditional approach has been to decompose this problem into elevation mapping and foothold planning…
We present Visual Navigation and Locomotion over obstacles (ViNL), which enables a quadrupedal robot to navigate unseen apartments while stepping over small obstacles that lie in its path (e.g., shoes, toys, cables), similar to how humans…
We propose a learning-based method to reconstruct the local terrain for locomotion with a mobile robot traversing urban environments. Using a stream of depth measurements from the onboard cameras and the robot's trajectory, the algorithm…
Mobile ground robots operating on unstructured terrain must predict which areas of the environment they are able to pass in order to plan feasible paths. We address traversability estimation as a heightmap classification problem: we build a…
Humans can routinely follow a trajectory defined by a list of images/landmarks. However, traditional robot navigation methods require accurate mapping of the environment, localization, and planning. Moreover, these methods are sensitive to…
Estimating terrain traversability in off-road environments requires reasoning about complex interaction dynamics between the robot and these terrains. However, it is challenging to create informative labels to learn a model in a supervised…
Estimation of tactile properties from vision, such as slipperiness or roughness, is important to effectively interact with the environment. These tactile properties help us decide which actions we should choose and how to perform them.…
Traversability estimation in rugged, unstructured environments remains a challenging problem in field robotics. Often, the need for precise, accurate traversability estimation is in direct opposition to the limited sensing and compute…
Humanoid robots are engineered to navigate terrains akin to those encountered by humans, which necessitates human-like locomotion and perceptual abilities. Currently, the most reliable controllers for humanoid motion rely exclusively on…
Accurate traversability estimation is essential for safe and effective navigation of outdoor robots operating in complex environments. This paper introduces a novel experience-based method that allows robots to autonomously learn which…
The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing…