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Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological…
Locomotion gaits are fundamental for control of soft terrestrial robots. However, synthesis of these gaits is challenging due to modeling of robot-environment interaction and lack of a mathematical framework. This work presents an…
Hybrid locomotion of wheeled-legged robots has recently attracted increasing attention due to their advantages of combining the agility of legged locomotion and the efficiency of wheeled motion. But along with expanded performance, the…
Legged robot locomotion is a challenging task due to a myriad of sub-problems, such as the hybrid dynamics of foot contact and the effects of the desired gait on the terrain. Accurate and efficient state estimation of the floating base and…
While it is relatively easier to train humanoid robots to mimic specific locomotion skills, it is more challenging to learn from various motions and adhere to continuously changing commands. These robots must accurately track motion…
Wheel-legged robots combine the efficiency of wheeled locomotion with the versatility of legged systems, enabling rapid traversal over both continuous and discrete terrains. However, conventional designs typically employ fixed wheels as…
This paper presents an online framework for synthesizing agile locomotion for bipedal robots that adapts to unknown environments, modeling errors, and external disturbances. To this end, we leverage step-to-step (S2S) dynamics which has…
A deformable land-air robot is introduced with excellent driving and flying capabilities, offering a smooth switching mechanism between the two modes. An elaborate coupled dynamics model is established for the robot, including rotors,…
This paper is dedicated to the development of a novel adaptive torsion spring mechanism for optimizing energy consumption in legged robots. By adjusting the equilibrium position and stiffness of the spring, the system improves energy…
A vast number of applications for legged robots entail tasks in complex, dynamic environments. But these environments put legged robots at high risk for limb damage. This paper presents an empirical study of fault tolerant dynamic gaits…
Limitations in actuation, sensing, and computation have forced small legged robots to rely on carefully tuned, mechanically mediated leg trajectories for effective locomotion. Recent advances in manufacturing, however, have enabled the…
Soft robots are naturally designed to perform safe interactions with their environment, like locomotion and manipulation. In the literature, there are now many concepts, often bio-inspired, to propose new modes of locomotion or grasping.…
Robust and energy-efficient bipedal locomotion in robotics is still a challenging topic. In order to address issues in this field, we can take inspiration from nature, by studying human locomotion. The Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP)…
We present a model-based framework for robot locomotion that achieves walking based on only 4.5 minutes (45,000 control steps) of data collected on a quadruped robot. To accurately model the robot's dynamics over a long horizon, we…
Whole-body manipulation is a powerful yet underexplored approach that enables robots to interact with large, heavy, or awkward objects using more than just their end-effectors. Soft robots, with their inherent passive compliance, are…
Soft robots are distinguished by their flexibility and adaptability, allowing them to perform nearly impossible tasks for rigid robots. However, controlling their behavior is challenging due to their nonlinear material response and infinite…
Amphibious legged robots inspired by salamanders are promising in applications in complex amphibious environments. However, despite the significant success of training controllers that achieve diverse locomotion behaviors in conventional…
Simultaneous locomotion and manipulation enables robots to interact with their environment beyond the constraints of a fixed base. However, coordinating legged locomotion with arm manipulation, while considering safety and compliance during…
Recent success in legged robot locomotion is attributed to the integration of reinforcement learning and physical simulators. However, these policies often encounter challenges when deployed in real-world environments due to sim-to-real…
In this review we introduce the framework of reality-assisted evolution to summarize a growing trend towards combining model-based and model-free approaches to improve the design of physically embodied soft robots. In silico, data-driven…