Related papers: Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular …
Centipedes exhibit great maneuverability in diverse environments due to their many legs and body-driven control. By leveraging similar morphologies and control strategies, their robotic counterparts also demonstrate effective terrestrial…
Operations in hazardous environments put humans, animals, and machines at high risk for physically damaging consequences. In contrast to humans and animals, quadruped robots cannot naturally identify and adjust their locomotion to a…
A robot's mechanical parts routinely wear out from normal functioning and can be lost to injury. For autonomous robots operating in isolated or hostile environments, repair from a human operator is often not possible. Thus, much work has…
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.…
Learning-based methods have achieved strong performance for quadrupedal locomotion. However, several challenges prevent quadrupeds from learning helpful indoor skills that require interaction with environments and humans: lack of…
This paper presents the design, analysis, and performance evaluation of an omnidirectional transformable wheel-leg robot called OmniWheg. We design a novel mechanism consisting of a separable omni-wheel and 4-bar linkages, allowing the…
This paper describes the design and control of a support and recovery system for use with planar legged robots. The system operates in three modes. First, it can be operated in a fully transparent mode where no forces are applied to the…
Performing agile navigation with four-legged robots is a challenging task due to the highly dynamic motions, contacts with various parts of the robot, and the limited field of view of the perception sensors. In this paper, we propose a…
Modular robotics holds immense potential for space exploration, where reliability, repairability, and reusability are critical for cost-effective missions. Coordination between heterogeneous units is paramount for precision tasks -- whether…
Moving a module in a modular robot is a very complex and error-prone process. Unlike in swarm, in the modular robots we are targeting, the moving module must keep the connection to, at least, one other module. In order to miniaturize each…
The remarkable athletic intelligence displayed by humans in complex dynamic movements such as dancing and gymnastics suggests that the balance mechanism in biological beings is decoupled from specific movement patterns. This decoupling…
From the complex motions of robots to the oxygen binding of hemoglobin, the function of many mechanical systems depends on large, coordinated movements of their components. Such movements arise from a network of physical interactions in the…
Learning multiple gaits is non-trivial for legged robots, especially when encountering different terrains and velocity commands. In this work, we present an end-to-end training framework for learning multiple gaits for quadruped robots,…
Humans are able to negotiate downstep behaviors -- both planned and unplanned -- with remarkable agility and ease. The goal of this paper is to systematically study the translation of this human behavior to bipedal walking robots, even if…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Despite growing interest in developing legged robots that emulate biological locomotion for agile navigation of complex environments, acquiring a diverse repertoire of skills remains a fundamental challenge in robotics. Existing methods can…
Multilegged robots have the ability to perform stable locomotion on relatively rough terrain. However, the complexity of legged robots over wheeled or tracked robots make them difficult to control. This paper presents OpenSHC (Open-source…
Salamander-like quadruped robots are designed inspired by the skeletal structure of their biological counterparts. However, existing controllers cannot fully exploit these morphological features and largely rely on predefined gait patterns…
Legged systems have many advantages when compared to their wheeled counterparts. For example, they can more easily navigate extreme, uneven terrain. However, there are disadvantages as well, particularly the difficulty seen in modeling the…
Loco-manipulation of quadrupedal robots has broadened robotic applications, but using legs as manipulators often compromises locomotion, while mounting arms complicates the system. To mitigate this issue, we introduce bipedalism for…