Related papers: Generating Diverse Challenging Terrains for Legged…
Terrain-aware locomotion has become an emerging topic in legged robotics. However, it is hard to generate diverse, challenging, and realistic unstructured terrains in simulation, which limits the way researchers evaluate their locomotion…
Developing bipedal robots capable of traversing diverse real-world terrains presents a fundamental robotics challenge, as existing methods using predefined height maps and static environments fail to address the complexity of unstructured…
Soft robotics aims to develop robots able to adapt their behavior across a wide range of unstructured and unknown environments. A critical challenge of soft robotic control is that nonlinear dynamics often result in complex behaviors hard…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controllers for quadrupedal locomotion have demonstrated impressive performance on challenging terrains, allowing robots to execute complex skills such as climbing, running, and jumping. However, existing…
Terrain adaptation is an essential capability for a ground robot to effectively traverse unstructured off-road terrain in real-world field environments such as forests. However, the expected robot behaviors generated by terrain adaptation…
The growth of scale and complexity of interactions between humans and robots highlights the need for new computational methods to automatically evaluate novel algorithms and applications. Exploring diverse scenarios of humans and robots…
Legged robots must exhibit robust and agile locomotion across diverse, unstructured terrains, a challenge exacerbated under blind locomotion settings where terrain information is unavailable. This work introduces a hierarchical…
In real-world environments, robots need to be resilient to damages and robust to unforeseen scenarios. Quality-Diversity (QD) algorithms have been successfully used to make robots adapt to damages in seconds by leveraging a diverse set of…
Legged robots are physically capable of traversing a wide range of challenging environments, but designing controllers that are sufficiently robust to handle this diversity has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Reinforcement…
Locomotion mechanics of legged robots are suitable when pacing through difficult terrains. Recognising terrains for such robots are important to fully yoke the versatility of their movements. Consequently, robotic terrain classification…
Inspired by the digital twinning systems, a novel real-time digital double framework is developed to enhance robot perception of the terrain conditions. Based on the very same physical model and motion control, this work exploits the use of…
Quality Diversity (QD) has shown great success in discovering high-performing, diverse policies for robot skill learning. While current benchmarks have led to the development of powerful QD methods, we argue that new paradigms must be…
Computing stabilizing and optimal control actions for legged locomotion in real time is difficult due to the nonlinear, hybrid, and high dimensional nature of these robots. The hybrid nature of the system introduces a combination of…
In swarm robotics, any of the robots in a swarm may be affected by different faults, resulting in significant performance declines. To allow fault recovery from randomly injected faults to different robots in a swarm, a model-free approach…
Robotics would gain by replicating the remarkable agility of arthropods in navigating complex environments. Here we consider the control of multi-legged systems which have 6 or more legs. Current multi-legged control strategies in robots…
The ability to efficiently and effectively explore planetary surfaces is currently limited by the capability of wheeled rovers to traverse challenging terrains, and by pre-programmed data acquisition plans with limited in-situ flexibility.…
We combine MAP-Elites and highly parallelisable simulation to explore the design space of a class of large legged robots, which stand at around 2m tall and whose design and construction is not well-studied. The simulation is modified to…
Legged robots are popular candidates for missions in challenging terrains due to the wide variety of locomotion strategies they can employ. Terrain classification is a key enabling technology for autonomous legged robots, as it allows the…
In order to perform highly dynamic and agile maneuvers, legged robots typically spend time in underactuated domains (e.g. with feet off the ground) where the system has limited command of its acceleration and a constrained amount of time…
Quality-Diversity is a branch of stochastic optimization that is often applied to problems from the Reinforcement Learning and control domains in order to construct repertoires of well-performing policies/skills that exhibit diversity with…