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Wearable and legged robot designers face multiple challenges when choosing actuation. Traditional fully actuated designs using electric motors are multifunctional but oversized and inefficient for bearing conservative loads and for being…

Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…

We consider optimal transport based distributionally robust optimization (DRO) problems with locally strongly convex transport cost functions and affine decision rules. Under conventional convexity assumptions on the underlying loss…

Muscle models and animal observations suggest that physical damping is beneficial for stabilization. Still, only a few implementations of mechanical damping exist in compliant robotic legged locomotion. It remains unclear how physical…

Although stress-constrained topology optimization has been extensively studied in structural design, the development of optimization frameworks to enable the creation of metamaterials with optimal mechanical performance is still an open…

The demand and the potential for automation in the construction sector is unmatched, particularly for increasing environmental sustainability, improving worker safety and reducing labor shortages. We have developed an autonomous walking…

Tow steering technologies, such as Automated fiber placement, enable the fabrication of composite laminates with curvilinear fiber, tow, or tape paths. Designers may therefore tailor tow orientations locally according to the expected local…

Performing highly agile acrobatic motions with a long flight phase requires perfect timing, high accuracy, and coordination of the full-body motion. To address these challenges, we present a novel approach on timings and trajectory…

Robots and intelligent systems that sense or interact with the world are increasingly being used to automate a wide array of tasks. The ability of these systems to complete these tasks depends on a large range of technologies such as the…

Evolutionary robotics has aimed to optimize robot control and morphology to produce better and more robust robots. Most previous research only addresses optimization of control, and does this only in simulation. We have developed a…

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…

A robot's dynamics -- especially the degree and location of compliance -- can significantly affect performance and control complexity. Passive dynamics can be designed with good regions of attraction or limit cycles for a specific task, but…

Trajectory optimization and posture generation are hard problems in robot locomotion, which can be non-convex and have multiple local optima. Progress on these problems is further hindered by a lack of open benchmarks, since comparisons of…

A vast number of applications for legged robots entail tasks in complex, dynamic environments. But these environments put legged robots at high risk for limb damage. This paper presents an empirical study of fault tolerant dynamic gaits…

Terrain geometry is, in general, non-smooth, non-linear, non-convex, and, if perceived through a robot-centric visual unit, appears partially occluded and noisy. This work presents the complete control pipeline capable of handling the…

Achieving stable and energy-efficient locomotion is essential for humanoid robots to operate continuously in real-world applications. Existing MPC and RL approaches often rely on energy-related metrics embedded within a multi-objective…

Typical leg exoskeletons employ open-loop kinematic chains with motors placed directly on movable joints; while this design offers flexibility, it leads to increased costs and heightened control complexity due to the high number of degrees…

We present a computational design system that assists users to model, optimize, and fabricate quad-robots with soft skins.Our system addresses the challenging task of predicting their physical behavior by fully integrating the multibody…

Bipedal robots have received much attention because of the variety of motion maneuvers that they can produce, and the many applications they have in various areas including rehabilitation. One of these motion maneuvers is walking. In this…

Adaptive recovery from fall incidents are essential skills for the practical deployment of wheeled-legged robots, which uniquely combine the agility of legs with the speed of wheels for rapid recovery. However, traditional methods relying…