Related papers: Hold My Beer: Learning Gentle Humanoid Locomotion …
The ability to push large objects in a goal-directed manner using onboard egocentric perception is an essential skill for humanoid robots to perform complex tasks such as material handling in warehouses. To robustly manipulate heavy objects…
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…
This paper presents a novel passivity-based semi-autonomous attitude control framework, with a particular focus on attitude kinematics defined on the special orthogonal group $SO(3)$. While human-robot interaction facilitates the successful…
Achieving robust, human-like whole-body control on humanoid robots for agile, contact-rich behaviors remains a central challenge, demanding heavy per-skill engineering and a brittle process of tuning controllers. We introduce ZEST…
Social navigation for bipedal robots remains relatively unexplored due to the highly complex, nonlinear dynamics of bipedal locomotion. This study presents a preliminary exploration of social navigation for bipedal robots in a human crowded…
Parkour is a grand challenge for legged locomotion, even for quadruped robots, requiring active perception and various maneuvers to overcome multiple challenging obstacles. Existing methods for humanoid locomotion either optimize a…
We present a reinforcement learning framework for autonomous goalkeeping with humanoid robots in real-world scenarios. While prior work has demonstrated similar capabilities on quadrupedal platforms, humanoid goalkeeping introduces two…
Embodied intelligence seamlessly integrates vision, language, and action.~However, most multimodal robotic models rely on massive fine-tuning, incurring high time and hardware costs.~To address this, we introduce RoboBERT, an end-to-end…
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,…
The complexity of a legged robot's environment or task can inform how specialised its gait must be to ensure success. Evolving specialised robotic gaits demands many evaluations - acceptable for computer simulations, but not for physical…
Sidewinding, a locomotion strategy characterized by the coordination of lateral and vertical body undulations, is frequently observed in rattlesnakes and has been successfully reconstructed by limbless robotic systems for effective movement…
Navigating rugged terrain and steep slopes is a challenge for mobile robots. Conventional legged and wheeled systems struggle with these environments due to limited traction and stability. Northeastern University's COBRA (Crater Observing…
Haptic upper limb exoskeletons are robots that assist human operators during task execution while having the ability to render virtual or remote environments. Therefore, the stability of such robots in physical human-robot-environment…
Human intervention is an effective way to inject human knowledge into the training loop of reinforcement learning, which can bring fast learning and ensured training safety. Given the very limited budget of human intervention, it remains…
In order for a humanoid robot to perform loco-manipulation such as moving an object while walking, it is necessary to account for sustained or alternating external forces other than ground-feet reaction, resulting from humanoid-object…
With the development of intelligent connected vehicle technology, human-machine shared control has gained popularity in vehicle following due to its effectiveness in driver assistance. However, traditional vehicle following systems struggle…
Despite recent advances in control, reinforcement learning, and imitation learning, developing a unified framework that can achieve agile, precise, and robust whole-body behaviors, particularly in long-horizon tasks, remains challenging.…
Federated learning faces severe communication bottlenecks due to the high dimensionality of model updates. Communication compression with contractive compressors (e.g., Top-K) is often preferable in practice but can degrade performance…
Assistance during eating is essential for those with severe mobility issues or eating risks. However, dependence on traditional human caregivers is linked to malnutrition, weight loss, and low self-esteem. For those who require eating…
Achieving versatile and naturalistic whole-body control for humanoid robot scene-interaction remains a significant challenge. While some recent works have demonstrated autonomous humanoid interactive control, they are constrained to rigid…