Related papers: A Comparative Study of Floating-Base Space Paramet…
Faced with complex and unstructured construction environments, wheeled and tracked robots exhibit significant limitations in terrain adaptability and flexibility, making it difficult to meet the requirements of autonomous operation.…
In this paper we present a new approach for dynamic motion planning for legged robots. We formulate a trajectory optimization problem based on a compact form of the robot dynamics. Such a form is obtained by projecting the rigid body…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
Dynamic maneuvers for legged robots present a difficult challenge due to the complex dynamics and contact constraints. This paper introduces a versatile trajectory optimization framework for continuous-time multi-phase problems. We…
The linearization of the equations of motion of a robotics system about a given state-input trajectory, including a controlled equilibrium state, is a valuable tool for model-based planning, closed-loop control, gain tuning, and state…
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…
Continuum robots with floating bases demonstrate exceptional operational capabilities in confined spaces, such as those encountered in medical surgeries and equipment maintenance. However, developing low-cost solutions for their motion and…
Planning for legged-wheeled machines is typically done using trajectory optimization because of many degrees of freedom, thus rendering legged-wheeled planners prone to falling prey to bad local minima. We present a combined sampling and…
The levels of agility and flight or swimming performance demonstrated by insects, birds, fish, and even some aquatic invertebrates, are often vastly superior to what even the most advanced human-engineered vehicles operating in the same…
Floating-base multi-link robots can change their shape during flight, making them well-suited for applications in confined environments such as autonomous inspection and search and rescue. However, trajectory planning for such systems…
Numerical optimization has become a popular approach to plan smooth motion trajectories for robots. However, when sharing space with humans, balancing properly safety, comfort and efficiency still remains challenging. This is notably the…
We propose an online motion planner for legged robot locomotion with the primary objective of achieving energy efficiency. The conceptual idea is to leverage a placement set of footstep positions based on the robot's body position to…
Precise trajectory tracking for legged robots can be challenging due to their high degrees of freedom, unmodeled nonlinear dynamics, or random disturbances from the environment. A commonly adopted solution to overcome these challenges is to…
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…
Designing robot morphologies and kinematics has traditionally relied on human intuition, with little systematic foundation. Motion-design co-optimization offers a promising path toward automation, but two major challenges remain: (i) the…
Recent research on mobile robots has focused on increasing their adaptability to unpredictable and unstructured environments using soft materials and structures. However, the determination of key design parameters and control over these…
To generate reliable motion for legged robots through trajectory optimization, it is crucial to simultaneously compute the robot's path and contact sequence, as well as accurately consider the dynamics in the problem formulation. In this…
In this work we present a trajectory Optimization framework for whole-body motion planning through contacts. We demonstrate how the proposed approach can be applied to automatically discover different gaits and dynamic motions on a…
We present a legged motion planning approach for quadrupedal locomotion over challenging terrain. We decompose the problem into body action planning and footstep planning. We use a lattice representation together with a set of defined body…
We present a versatile framework for the computational co-design of legged robots and dynamic maneuvers. Current state-of-the-art approaches are typically based on random sampling or concurrent optimization. We propose a novel bilevel…