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Humanoid robots may require a degree of compliance at the joint level for improving efficiency, shock tolerance, and safe interaction with humans. The presence of joint elasticity, however, complexifies the design of balancing and walking…
Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…
Humanoid robots deployed in industrial environments are required to perform load-carrying transportation tasks that tightly couple locomotion and manipulation. However, achieving stable and robust locomotion under varying payloads and…
Computing stabilizing and optimal control actions for legged locomotion in real time is difficult due to the nonlinear, hybrid, and high dimensional nature of these robots. The hybrid nature of the system introduces a combination of…
Stabilizing legged robot locomotion on a dynamic rigid surface (DRS) (i.e., rigid surface that moves in the inertial frame) is a complex planning and control problem. The complexity arises due to the hybrid nonlinear walking dynamics…
A spherical robot consists of an externally spherical rigid body rolling on a two-dimensional surface, actuated by an auxiliary mechanism. For a class of actuation mechanisms, we derive a controller for the geometric center of the sphere to…
In this paper, we present a hardware-control co-design approach that enables efficient and versatile roller skating on quadrupedal robots equipped with passive wheels. Passive-wheel skating reduces leg inertia and improves energy…
We design, build, and thoroughly test a new type of actuator dubbed viscoelastic liquid cooled actuator (VLCA) for robotic applications. VLCAs excel in the following five critical axes of performance: energy efficiency, torque density,…
Due to their ability to adapt to different terrains, quadruped robots have drawn much attention in the research field of robot learning. Legged mobile manipulation, where a quadruped robot is equipped with a robotic arm, can greatly enhance…
Understanding and predicting articulated actions is important in robot learning. However, common architectures such as MLPs and Transformers lack inductive biases that reflect the underlying kinematic structure of articulated systems. To…
Legged robot locomotion requires the planning of stable reference trajectories, especially while traversing uneven terrain. The proposed trajectory optimization framework is capable of generating dynamically stable base and footstep…
Deep reinforcement learning produces robust locomotion policies for legged robots over challenging terrains. To date, few studies have leveraged model-based methods to combine these locomotion skills with the precise control of…
Real-world robots are becoming increasingly complex and commonly act in poorly understood environments where it is extremely challenging to model or learn their true dynamics. Therefore, it might be desirable to take a task-specific…
Many studies have been conducted on Series Elastic Actuators (SEA) for robot joints because they are effective in terms of flexibility, safety, and energy efficiency. The ability of SEA to robustly handle unexpected disturbances has raised…
Trajectory optimization and posture generation are hard problems in robot locomotion, which can be non-convex and have multiple local optima. Progress on these problems is further hindered by a lack of open benchmarks, since comparisons of…
To generate reliable motion for legged robots through trajectory optimization, it is crucial to simultaneously compute the robot's path and contact sequence, as well as accurately consider the dynamics in the problem formulation. In this…
The control of legged robots, particularly humanoid and quadruped robots, presents significant challenges due to their high-dimensional and nonlinear dynamics. While linear systems can be effectively controlled using methods like Model…
This work developed a kernel-based residual learning framework for quadrupedal robotic locomotion. Initially, a kernel neural network is trained with data collected from an MPC controller. Alongside a frozen kernel network, a residual…
Quadrupedal locomotion over complex terrain has been a long-standing research topic in robotics. While recent reinforcement learning-based locomotion methods improve generalizability and foot-placement precision, they rely on implicit…
Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…