Related papers: Friction-Aware Safety Locomotion for Wheeled-legge…
Automatic fall recovery is a crucial prerequisite before humanoid robots can be reliably deployed. Hand-designing controllers for getting up is difficult because of the varied configurations a humanoid can end up in after a fall and the…
Vision Language Action (VLA) models enable instruction following manipulation, yet dualarm deployment remains unsafe due to under modeled selfcollisions between arms and grasped objects. We introduce CoFreeVLA, which augments an endtoend…
Robotic systems are increasingly expected to operate in human-centered, unstructured environments where safety, adaptability, and generalization are essential. Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models have been proposed as a language guided…
Motion mimicking, i.e., encouraging the control policy to mimic human motion, facilitates the learning of complex tasks via reinforcement learning (RL) for humanoid robots. Although standard RL frameworks demonstrate impressive locomotion…
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…
Control of legged robots is a challenging problem that has been investigated by different approaches, such as model-based control and learning algorithms. This work proposes a novel Imitating and Finetuning Model Predictive Control (IFM)…
Soft robotic crawlers are mobile robots that utilize soft body deformability and compliance to achieve locomotion through surface contact. Designing control strategies for such systems is challenging due to model inaccuracies, sensor noise,…
Recent progress in vision language foundation models has shown their ability to understand multimodal data and resolve complicated vision language tasks, including robotics manipulation. We seek a straightforward way of making use of…
Robots operating in dynamic, unstructured environments must balance safety and efficiency under potentially limited sensing. While control barrier functions (CBFs) provide principled collision avoidance via safety filtering, their behavior…
Precise identification of dynamic models in robotics is essential to support control design, friction compensation, output torque estimation, etc. A longstanding challenge remains in the identification of friction models for robotic joints,…
Robot manipulation policies, while central to the promise of physical AI, are highly vulnerable in the presence of external variations in the real world. Diagnosing these vulnerabilities is hindered by two key challenges: (i) the relevant…
Improving embodied reasoning in multimodal-large-language models (MLLMs) is essential for building vision-language-action models (VLAs) on top of them to readily translate multimodal understanding into low-level actions. Accordingly, recent…
Multi-legged robots with six or more legs are not in common use, despite designs with superior stability, maneuverability, and a low number of actuators being available for over 20 years. This may be in part due to the difficulty in…
Dynamic quadrupedal locomotion over rough terrains reveals remarkable progress over the last few decades. Small-scale quadruped robots are adequately flexible and adaptable to traverse uneven terrains along sagittal direction, such as…
Humanoid robots operating in human-centered environments (e.g., homes, hospitals, and offices) must mitigate foot--ground impact transients, as impact-induced vibration and noise degrade user experience and repeated impacts accelerate…
We present Learned Risk Metric Maps (LRMM) for real-time estimation of coherent risk metrics of high dimensional dynamical systems operating in unstructured, partially observed environments. LRMM models are simple to design and train --…
Reinforcement learning methods as a promising technique have achieved superior results in the motion planning of free-floating space robots. However, due to the increase in planning dimension and the intensification of system dynamics…
Despite growing interest in developing legged robots that emulate biological locomotion for agile navigation of complex environments, acquiring a diverse repertoire of skills remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Existing methods can…
(Simplified Abstract) To accomplish breakthroughs in dynamic whole-body locomotion, legged robots have to be terrain aware. Terrain-Aware Locomotion (TAL) implies that the robot can perceive the terrain with its sensors, and can take…
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) demonstrate strong general-purpose reasoning but remain limited in physics-grounded anomaly detection, where causal understanding of dynamics is essential. Existing VLMs, trained predominantly on…