Related papers: Steering Elongate Multi-legged Robots By Modulatin…

Developing agile behaviors for legged robots remains a challenging problem. While deep reinforcement learning is a promising approach, learning truly agile behaviors typically requires tedious reward shaping and careful curriculum design.…

Task space trajectory tracking for quadruped robots plays a crucial role on achieving dexterous maneuvers in unstructured environments. To fulfill the control objective, the robot should apply forces through the contact of the legs with the…

Continuum robots with floating bases demonstrate exceptional operational capabilities in confined spaces, such as those encountered in medical surgeries and equipment maintenance. However, developing low-cost solutions for their motion and…

One of the fundamental challenges in realizing the potential of legged robots is generating plans to traverse challenging terrains. Control actions must be carefully selected so the robot will not crash or slip. The high dimensionality of…

Many animals and robots move using undulatory motion of their bodies. When in close proximity undulatory motion can lead to novel collective behaviors such as gait synchronization, spatial reconfiguration, and clustering. Here we study the…

For legged robots, aerial motions are the only option to overpass obstacles that cannot be circumvent with standard locomotion gaits. In these cases, the robot must perform a leap to either jump onto the obstacle or fly over it. However,…

Locomotion on granular slopes such as sand dunes remains a fundamental challenge for legged robots due to reduced shear strength and gravity-induced anisotropic yielding of granular media. Using a hexapedal robot on a tiltable granular bed,…

Legged robots are increasingly entering new domains and applications, including search and rescue, inspection, and logistics. However, for such systems to be valuable in real-world scenarios, they must be able to autonomously and robustly…

Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…

Soft robots - due to their intrinsic flexibility of the body - can adaptively navigate unstructured environments. One of the most popular locomotion gaits that has been implemented in soft robots is undulation. The undulation motion in soft…

Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…

Most locomotion methods for humanoid robots focus on leg-based gaits, yet natural bipeds frequently rely on hands, knees, and elbows to establish additional contacts for stability and support in complex environments. This paper introduces…

A large-scale mobile robot (LSMR) is a high-order multibody system that often operates on loose, unconsolidated terrain, which reduces traction. This paper presents a comprehensive navigation and control framework for an LSMR that ensures…

Circumnavigation control is useful in real-world applications such as entrapping a hostile target. In this paper, we consider a heterogeneous multi-robot system where robots have different physical properties, such as maximum movement…

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…

Developing a framework for the locomotion of a six-legged robot or a hexapod is a complex task that has extensive hardware and computational requirements. In this paper, we present a bio-inspired framework for the locomotion of a hexapod.…

Legged robots are physically capable of traversing a wide range of challenging environments, but designing controllers that are sufficiently robust to handle this diversity has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Reinforcement…

Here, we report on a new class active particles capable of dynamically programmable motion powered by electricity. We have implemented physical principles that separate the propulsion and steering mechanisms of active motion using optically…

Current approaches to humanoid control generally fall into two paradigms: perceptive locomotion, which handles terrain well but is limited to pedal gaits, and general motion tracking, which reproduces complex skills but ignores…

This paper presents a layered control approach for real-time trajectory planning and control of robust cooperative locomotion by two holonomically constrained quadrupedal robots. A novel interconnected network of reduced-order models, based…