Related papers: Development of a PPO-Reinforcement Learned Walking…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) has been positioned by recent literature as the canonical method for the RL part of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). PPO performs well empirically but has a heuristic motivation and…
Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) is a popular model-free reinforcement learning algorithm, esteemed for its simplicity and efficacy. However, due to its inherent on-policy nature, its proficiency in harnessing data from disparate policies…
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged robots are equipped with a dedicated robot arm, which means…
Locomotion has seen dramatic progress for walking or running across challenging terrains. However, robotic quadrupeds are still far behind their biological counterparts, such as dogs, which display a variety of agile skills and can use the…
In this paper, with a view toward deployment of light-weight control frameworks for bipedal walking robots, we realize end-foot trajectories that are shaped by a single linear feedback policy. We learn this policy via a model-free and a…
Legged robots, specifically quadrupeds, are becoming increasingly attractive for industrial applications such as inspection. However, to leave the laboratory and to become useful to an end user requires reliability in harsh conditions. From…
With the rapid development of embodied intelligence, locomotion control of quadruped robots on complex terrains has become a research hotspot. Unlike traditional locomotion control approaches focusing solely on velocity tracking, we pursue…
Legged locomotion on flowing ground ({\em e.g.} granular media) is unlike locomotion on hard ground because feet experience both solid- and fluid-like forces during surface penetration. Recent bio-inspired legged robots display speed…
A wide range of microorganisms, e.g. bacteria, propel themselves by rotation of soft helical tails, also known as flagella. Due to the small size of these organisms, viscous forces overwhelm inertial effects and the flow is at low Reynolds…
This paper describes the hardware, software framework, and experimental testing of SURENA IV humanoid robotics platform. SURENA IV has 43 degrees of freedom (DoFs), including seven DoFs for each arm, six DoFs for each hand, and six DoFs for…
SLOT (Soft Legged Omnidirectional Tetrapod), a tendon-driven soft quadruped robot with 3D-printed TPU legs, is presented to study physics-informed modeling and control of compliant legged locomotion using only four actuators. Each leg is…
Reinforcement learning (RL) is a promising approach for solving robotic manipulation tasks. However, it is challenging to apply the RL algorithms directly in the real world. For one thing, RL is data-intensive and typically requires…
This paper presents a control framework to teleoperate a quadruped robot's foot for operator-guided haptic exploration of the environment. Since one leg of a quadruped robot typically only has 3 actuated degrees of freedom (DoFs), the torso…
This study investigates formal-method-based trajectory optimization (TO) for bipedal locomotion, focusing on scenarios where the robot encounters external perturbations at unforeseen times. Our key research question centers around the…
Developing robot controllers capable of achieving dexterous nonprehensile manipulation, such as pushing an object on a table, is challenging. The underactuated and hybrid-dynamics nature of the problem, further complicated by the…
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…
Flexible manufacturing processes demand robots to easily adapt to changes in the environment and interact with humans. In such dynamic scenarios, robotic tasks may be programmed through learning-from-demonstration approaches, where a…
Vision-based robotic cloth unfolding has made great progress recently. However, prior works predominantly rely on value learning and have not fully explored policy-based techniques. Recently, the success of reinforcement learning on the…
Robot person following (RPF) -- mobile robots that follow and assist a specific person -- has emerging applications in personal assistance, security patrols, eldercare, and logistics. To be effective, such robots must follow the target…
Safe exploration is a key to applying reinforcement learning (RL) in safety-critical systems. Existing safe exploration methods guaranteed safety under the assumption of regularity, and it has been difficult to apply them to large-scale…