Related papers: Quadrupedal Spine Control Strategies: Exploring Co…
Many methods exist for a bipedal robot to keep its balance while walking. In addition to step size and timing, other strategies are possible that influence the stability of the robot without interfering with the target direction and speed…
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…
Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…
Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…
The functional demands of robotic systems often require completing various tasks or behaviors under the effect of disturbances or uncertain environments. Of increasing interest is the autonomy for dynamic robots, such as multirotors, motor…
We focus on the problem of developing energy efficient controllers for quadrupedal robots. Animals can actively switch gaits at different speeds to lower their energy consumption. In this paper, we devise a hierarchical learning framework,…
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…
Swing arms have an irreplaceable role in promoting highly dynamic locomotion on bipedal robots by a larger angular momentum control space from the viewpoint of biomechanics. Few bipedal robots utilize swing arms and its redundancy…
In this paper, we improve upon a method for optimal control of quadrupedal robots which utilizes a full-order model of the system. The original method utilizes offline nonlinear optimal control to synthesize a control scheme which…
Designing agile locomotion for quadruped robots often requires extensive expertise and tedious manual tuning. In this paper, we present a system to automate this process by leveraging deep reinforcement learning techniques. Our system can…
Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…
High-speed legged navigation in discrete and geometrically complex environments is a challenging task because of the high-degree-of-freedom dynamics and long-horizon, nonconvex nature of the optimization problem. In this work, we propose a…
Energy management is a fundamental challenge for legged robots in outdoor environments. Endurance directly constrains mission success, while efficient resource use reduces ecological impact. This paper investigates how terrain slope and…
Despite the extensive presence of the legged locomotion in animals, it is extremely challenging to be reproduced with robots. Legged locomotion is an dynamic task which benefits from a planning that takes advantage of the gravitational pull…
When we go for a walk with friends, we can observe an interesting effect: From step lengths to arm movements - our movements unconsciously align; they synchronize. Prior research found that this synchronization is a crucial aspect of human…
Although bipedal locomotion provides the ability to traverse unstructured environments, it requires careful planning and control to safely walk across without falling. This poses an integrated challenge for the robot to perceive, plan, and…
In order to safely operate around humans, robots can employ predictive models of human motion. Unfortunately, these models cannot capture the full complexity of human behavior and necessarily introduce simplifying assumptions. As a result,…
Quadrupedal robots are skillful at locomotion tasks while lacking manipulation skills, not to mention dexterous manipulation abilities. Inspired by the animal behavior and the duality between multi-legged locomotion and multi-fingered…
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…
Bipedal animals have diverse morphologies and advanced locomotion abilities. Terrestrial birds, in particular, display agile, efficient, and robust running motion, in which they exploit the interplay between the body segment masses and…