Related papers: Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular …

We address the challenge of effectively controlling the locomotion of legged robots by incorporating precise frequency and phase characteristics, which is often ignored in locomotion policies that do not account for the periodic nature of…

Limbless creatures can crawl on flat surfaces by deforming their bodies and interacting with asperities on the ground, offering a biological blueprint for designing efficient limbless robots. Inspired by this natural locomotion, we present…

Agile and adaptive maneuvers such as fall recovery, high-speed turning, and sprinting in the wild are challenging for legged systems. We propose a Curricular Hindsight Reinforcement Learning (CHRL) that learns an end-to-end tracking…

Effective motion representation is crucial for enabling robots to imitate expressive behaviors in real time, yet existing motion controllers often ignore inherent patterns in motion. Previous efforts in representation learning do not…

Millirobots are a promising robotic platform for many applications due to their small size and low manufacturing costs. Legged millirobots, in particular, can provide increased mobility in complex environments and improved scaling of…

We demonstrate how multiagent systems provide useful control techniques for modular self-reconfigurable (metamorphic) robots. Such robots consist of many modules that can move relative to each other, thereby changing the overall shape of…

Modular and reconfigurable robotic systems have been designed to provide a customized solution for the non-repetitive tasks to be performed in a constrained environment. Customized solutions are normally extracted from task-based…

Soft pneumatic legged robots show promise in their ability to traverse a range of different types of terrain, including natural unstructured terrain met in applications like precision agriculture. They can adapt their body morphology to the…

This paper presents a novel approach that combines the advantages of both model-based and learning-based frameworks to achieve robust locomotion. The residual modules are integrated with each corresponding part of the model-based framework,…

Modern two and four legged robots exhibit impressive mobility on complex terrain, largely attributed to advancement in learning algorithms. However, these systems often rely on high-bandwidth sensing and onboard computation to…

Modularisation, repetition, and symmetry are structural features shared by almost all biological neural networks. These features are very unlikely to be found by the means of structural evolution of artificial neural networks. This paper…

Animals can accomplish many incredible behavioral feats across a wide range of operational environments and scales that current robots struggle to match. One explanation for this performance gap is the extraordinary properties of the…

Soft robotics holds tremendous potential for various applications, especially in unstructured environments such as search and rescue operations. However, the lack of autonomy and teleoperability, limited capabilities, absence of gait…

Every robot built to date was predesigned by an external process, prior to deployment. Here we show a robot that actively participates in its own design during its lifetime. Starting from a randomly assembled body, and using only…

Inspired by the necessity of morphological adaptation in animals, a growing body of work has attempted to expand robot training to encompass physical aspects of a robot's design. However, reinforcement learning methods capable of optimizing…

Amphibious robots, operating seamlessly across land and water, are advancing applications in conservation, disaster response, and defense. Their performance depends on locomotion mechanisms, actuation technologies, and sensor-control…

Utilizing teams of multiple robots is advantageous for handling bulky objects. Many related works focus on multi-manipulator systems, which are limited by workspace constraints. In this paper, we extend a classical hybrid motion-force…

The recent availability of commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) legged robot platforms have opened up new opportunities in deploying legged systems into different scenarios. While the main advantage of legged robots is their ability to traverse…

Robots operating in human environments need various skills, like slow and fast walking, turning, side-stepping, and many more. However, building robot controllers that can exhibit such a large range of behaviors is a challenging problem…

This paper introduces CognitiveDog, a pioneering development of quadruped robot with Large Multi-modal Model (LMM) that is capable of not only communicating with humans verbally but also physically interacting with the environment through…