Related papers: How Leg Stiffness Affects Energy Economy in Hoppin…
We present the design and implementation of HASTA (Hopper with Adjustable Stiffness for Terrain Adaptation), a vertical hopping robot with real-time tunable leg stiffness, aimed at optimizing energy efficiency across various ground profiles…
Quadruped robots are often designed with rigid feet to simplify control and maintain stable contact during locomotion. While this approach is straightforward, it limits the ability of the legs to absorb impact forces and reuse stored…
Legged robot locomotion is hindered by a mismatch between applications where legs can outperform wheels or treads, most of which feature deformable substrates, and existing tools for planning and control, most of which assume flat, rigid…
It is often overlooked by roboticists when designing locomotion controllers for their legged machines, that energy consumption plays an important role in selecting the best gaits for locomotion at high speeds or over long distances. The…
Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…
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)…
Passive elastic elements can contribute to stability, energetic efficiency, and impact absorption in both biological and robotic systems. They also add dynamical complexity which makes them more challenging to model and control. The impact…
A distinctive feature of quadrupeds that is integral to their locomotion is the tail. Tails serve many purposes in biological systems including propulsion, counterbalance, and stabilization while walking, running, climbing, or jumping.…
A hopping leg, no matter in legged animals or humans, usually behaves like a spring during the periodic hopping. Hopping like a spring is efficient and without the requirement of complicated control algorithms. Position and force control…
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…
Practical bipedal robot locomotion needs to be both energy efficient and robust to variability and uncertainty. In this paper, we build upon recent works in trajectory optimization for robot locomotion with two primary goals. First, we wish…
Robotic Hopping is challenging from the perspective of both modeling the dynamics as well as the mechanical design due to the short period of ground contact in which to actuate on the world. Previous work has demonstrated stable hopping on…
Energy efficiency is a critical factor in the performance and autonomy of quadrupedal robots. While previous research has focused on mechanical design and actuation improvements, the impact of gait parameters on energetics has been less…
Reinforcement-learned locomotion enables legged robots to perform highly dynamic motions but often accompanies time-consuming manual tuning of joint stiffness. This paper introduces a novel control paradigm that integrates variable…
Although commonly associated with limbless animals like snakes and fish, multi-legged organisms like centipedes also utilize undulatory locomotion. Whether these undulations are actively reinforced or resisted by the axial musculature…
In legged locomotion, the relationship between different gait behaviors and energy consumption must consider the full-body dynamics and the robot control as a whole, which cannot be captured by simple models. This work studies the robot…
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…
Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…
Legged robots promise higher versatility and the ability to traverse much more difficult terrains than their wheeled counterparts. Even though the use of legged robots have increased drastically in the last few years, they are still not…
In contrast with the diversity of materials found in nature, most robots are designed with some combination of aluminum, stainless steel, and 3D-printed filament. Additionally, robotic systems are typically assumed to follow basic…