Related papers: Gait Optimization for Legged Systems Through Mixed…
High-speed legged navigation in discrete and geometrically complex environments is a challenging task because of the high-degree-of-freedom dynamics and long-horizon, nonconvex nature of the optimization problem. In this work, we propose a…
We consider the following problem: a team of robots is deployed in an unknown environment and it has to collaboratively build a map of the area without a reliable infrastructure for communication. The backbone for modern mapping techniques…
The design of gaits for robot locomotion can be a daunting process which requires significant expert knowledge and engineering. This process is even more challenging for robots that do not have an accurate physical model, such as compliant…
Accurate control of a humanoid robot's global position (i.e., its three-dimensional position in the world) is critical to the reliable execution of high-risk tasks such as avoiding collision with pedestrians in a crowded environment. This…
Legged robots with closed-loop kinematic chains are increasingly prevalent due to their increased mobility and efficiency. Yet, most motion generation methods rely on serial-chain approximations, sidestepping their specific constraints and…
To overcome the obstructions imposed by high-dimensional bipedal models, we embed a stable walking motion in an attractive low-dimensional surface of the system's state space. The process begins with trajectory optimization to design an…
Hybrid locomotion, which combines multiple modalities of locomotion within a single robot, enables robots to carry out complex tasks in diverse environments. This paper presents a novel method for planning multi-modal locomotion…
We address the problem of adapting robot trajectories to improve safety, comfort, and efficiency in human-robot collaborative tasks. To this end, we propose CoMOTO, a trajectory optimization framework that utilizes stochastic motion…
Multi-robot control in cluttered environments is a challenging problem that involves complex physical constraints, including robot-robot collisions, robot-obstacle collisions, and unreachable motions. Successful planning in such settings…
Terrain geometry is, in general, non-smooth, non-linear, non-convex, and, if perceived through a robot-centric visual unit, appears partially occluded and noisy. This work presents the complete control pipeline capable of handling the…
Over the past decades, the performance design of closed-chain legged mechanisms (CLMs) has not been adequately addressed. Most existing design methodologies have predominantly relied on trajectory synthesis, which inadvertently prioritizes…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
Motion planning for locomotion systems typically requires translating high-level rigid-body tasks into low-level joint trajectories-a process that is straightforward for car-like robots with fixed, unbounded actuation inputs but more…
Legged manipulators, such as quadrupeds equipped with robotic arms, require motion planning techniques that account for their complex kinematic constraints in order to perform manipulation tasks both safely and effectively. However,…
We present a novel formulation of ergodic trajectory optimization that can be specified over general domains using kernel maximum mean discrepancy. Ergodic trajectory optimization is an effective approach that generates coverage paths for…
The problem of optimizing a sequence of tasks for a robot, also known as multi-point manufacturing, is a well-studied problem. Many of these solutions use a variant of the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) and seek to find the minimum…
We propose an online motion planner for legged robot locomotion with the primary objective of achieving energy efficiency. The conceptual idea is to leverage a placement set of footstep positions based on the robot's body position to…
Machine learning has achieved remarkable success over the past couple of decades, often attributed to a combination of algorithmic innovations and the availability of high-quality data available at scale. However, a third critical component…
Recent works in high-dimensional model-predictive control and model-based reinforcement learning with learned dynamics and reward models have resorted to population-based optimization methods, such as the Cross-Entropy Method (CEM), for…
Generating motions for robots interacting with objects of various shapes is a complex challenge, further complicated by the robot geometry and multiple desired behaviors. While current robot programming tools (such as inverse kinematics,…