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Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from symbolic systems have great potential for reasoning about high-level…
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…
Enabling robots to walk and run on yielding terrain is increasingly vital to endeavors ranging from disaster response to extraterrestrial exploration. While dynamic legged locomotion on rigid ground is challenging enough, yielding terrain…
In the context of legged robots, adaptive behavior involves adaptive balancing and adaptive swing foot reflection. While adaptive balancing counteracts perturbations to the robot, adaptive swing foot reflection helps the robot to navigate…
A particular type of assistive robots designed for physical interaction with objects could play an important role assisting with mobility and fall prevention in healthcare facilities. Autonomous mobile manipulation presents a hurdle prior…
Wheeled bipedal robots have garnered increasing attention in exploration and inspection. However, most research simplifies calculations by ignoring leg dynamics, thereby restricting the robot's full motion potential. Additionally, robots…
Planning locomotion trajectories for legged microrobots is challenging because of their complex morphology, high frequency passive dynamics, and discontinuous contact interactions with their environment. Consequently, such research is often…
Autonomous navigation in extreme mountainous terrains poses challenges due to the presence of mobility-stressing elements and undulating surfaces, making it particularly difficult compared to conventional off-road driving scenarios. In such…
The dynamic response of the legged robot locomotion is non-Lipschitz and can be stochastic due to environmental uncertainties. To test, validate, and characterize the safety performance of legged robots, existing solutions on observed and…
Despite cobots have high potential in bringing several benefits in the manufacturing and logistic processes, but their rapid (re-)deployment in changing environments is still limited. To enable fast adaptation to new product demands and to…
Design requirements for moving parts in mechanical assemblies are typically specified in terms of interactions with other parts. Some are purely kinematic (e.g., pairwise collision avoidance) while others depend on physics and material…
One major recurring challenge in deploying manipulation robots is determining the optimal placement of manipulators to maximize performance. This challenge is exacerbated in complex, cluttered agricultural environments of high-value crops,…
There have been several successful implementations of bio-inspired legged robots that can trot, walk, and hop robustly even in the presence of significant unplanned disturbances. Despite all of these accomplishments, practical control and…
Prosthesis users can regain partial limb functionality, however, full natural limb mobility is rarely restored, often resulting in compensatory movements that lead to discomfort, inefficiency, and long-term physical strain. To address this…
Locomotion in microgravity often relies on sparsely and irregularly arranged anchors, motivating grasp-based mobility with multiple limbs. In this setting, dynamic locomotion is feasible only through deliberate regulation of both anchored…
Path planning in the presence of dynamic obstacles is a challenging problem due to the added time dimension in search space. In approaches that ignore the time dimension and treat dynamic obstacles as static, frequent re-planning is…
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…
Modular robots have the potential to revolutionize automation, as one can optimize their composition for any given task. However, finding optimal compositions is non-trivial. In addition, different compositions require different base…
With the increasing presence of social robots in various environments and applications, there is an increasing need for these robots to exhibit socially-compliant behaviors. Legible motion, characterized by the ability of a robot to clearly…
This paper presents a novel approach to enhance Model Predictive Control (MPC) for legged robots through Distributed Optimization. Our method focuses on decomposing the robot dynamics into smaller, parallelizable subsystems, and utilizing…