Related papers: Variable Stiffness for Robust Locomotion through R…

Legged locomotion is a complex control problem that requires both accuracy and robustness to cope with real-world challenges. Legged systems have traditionally been controlled using trajectory optimization with inverse dynamics. Such…

Shared Control methods often use impedance control to track target poses in a robotic manipulator. The guidance behavior of such controllers is shaped by the used stiffness gains, which can be varying over time to achieve an adaptive…

We present a method for efficient learning of control policies for multiple related robotic motor skills. Our approach consists of two stages, joint training and specialization training. During the joint training stage, a neural network…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has enabled robust quadruped locomotion over complex terrain, but most learned controllers are trained offline with backpropagation in massively parallel simulation and deployed as fixed policies, limiting…

Mastering robotic manipulation skills through reinforcement learning (RL) typically requires the design of shaped reward functions. Recent developments in this area have demonstrated that using sparse rewards, i.e. rewarding the agent only…

Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…

Achieving stable and robust perceptive locomotion for bipedal robots in unstructured outdoor environments remains a critical challenge due to complex terrain geometry and susceptibility to external disturbances. In this work, we propose a…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has become a promising approach to developing controllers for quadrupedal robots. Conventionally, an RL design for locomotion follows a position-based paradigm, wherein an RL policy outputs target joint positions…

We propose a novel hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for quadruped locomotion over challenging terrain. Our approach incorporates a two-layer hierarchy in which a high-level policy (HLP) selects optimal goals for a low-level…

Humanoid robots have demonstrated impressive motor skills in a wide range of tasks, yet whole-body control for humanlike long-time, dynamic fighting remains particularly challenging due to the stringent requirements on agility and…

Due to brain-body co-evolution, animals' intrinsic body dynamics play a crucial role in energy-efficient locomotion, which shares control effort between active muscles and passive body dynamics -- a principle known as Embodied Physical…

While the animals' Fin-to-Limb evolution has been well-researched in biology, such morphological transformation remains under-adopted in the modern design of advanced robotic limbs. This paper investigates a novel class of overconstrained…

Legged locomotion is a highly promising but under-researched subfield within the field of soft robotics. The compliant limbs of soft-limbed robots offer numerous benefits, including the ability to regulate impacts, tolerate falls, and…

This paper presents a novel model-free reinforcement learning (RL) framework to design feedback control policies for 3D bipedal walking. Existing RL algorithms are often trained in an end-to-end manner or rely on prior knowledge of some…

A bio-inspired, passively deployable flap attached to an airfoil by a torsional spring of fixed stiffness can provide significant lift improvements at post-stall angles of attack. In this work, we describe a hybrid active-passive variant to…

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…

Deep reinforcement learning (deep RL) has emerged as an effective tool for developing controllers for legged robots. However, vanilla deep RL often requires a tremendous amount of training samples and is not feasible for achieving robust…

Recent breakthroughs in the reinforcement learning (RL) community have made significant advances towards learning and deploying policies on real world robotic systems. However, even with the current state-of-the-art algorithms and…

This paper introduces a new approach to enhance the robustness of humanoid walking under strong perturbations, such as substantial pushes. Effective recovery from external disturbances requires bipedal robots to dynamically adjust their…

Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured terrain. However, as planetary robots' power and thermal…