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Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…

Animals in nature combine multiple modalities, such as sight and feel, to perceive terrain and develop an understanding of how to walk on uneven terrain in a stable manner. Similarly, legged robots need to develop their ability to stably…

Robotics · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Kartikeya Singh , Youngjin Kim , Yash Turkar , Karthik Dantu

This paper introduces DogSurf - a newapproach of using quadruped robots to help visually impaired people navigate in real world. The presented method allows the quadruped robot to detect slippery surfaces, and to use audio and haptic…

Inspired by human behavior when traveling over unknown terrain, this study proposes the use of probing strategies and integrates them into a traversability analysis framework to address safe navigation on unknown rough terrain. Our…

In nature, legged animals have developed the ability to adapt to challenging terrains through perception, allowing them to plan safe body and foot trajectories in advance, which leads to safe and energy-efficient locomotion. Inspired by…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-12 Haojie Shi , Qingxu Zhu , Lei Han , Wanchao Chi , Tingguang Li , Max Q. -H. Meng

The ability to both recognize and discover terrain characteristics is an important function required for many autonomous ground robots such as social robots, assistive robots, autonomous vehicles, and ground exploration robots. Recognizing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2020-10-14 Akiyoshi Kurobe , Yoshikatsu Nakajima , Hideo Saito , Kris Kitani

Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-16 Yi Cheng , Hang Liu , Guoping Pan , Linqi Ye , Houde Liu , Bin Liang

For robots to operate autonomously in densely cluttered environments, they must reason about and potentially physically interact with obstacles to clear a path. Safely clearing a path on challenging terrain, such as a cluttered staircase,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-09-26 Prasanna Sriganesh , Barath Satheeshkumar , Anushree Sabnis , Matthew Travers

High resolution tactile sensing has great potential in autonomous mobile robotics, particularly for legged robots. One particular area where it has significant promise is the traversal of challenging, varied terrain. Depending on whether an…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Dexter R. Shepherd , Phil Husbands , Andy Philippides , Chris Johnson

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…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-11-11 Cong Wen , Yunfei Li , Kexin Liu , Yixin Qiu , Xuanhong Liao , Tianyu Wang , Dingchuan Liu , Tao Zhang , Ximin Lyu

Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-09-11 Yanhao Yang , Joseph Norby , Justin K. Yim , Aaron M. Johnson

Traversing risky terrains with sparse footholds presents significant challenges for legged robots, requiring precise foot placement in safe areas. To acquire comprehensive exteroceptive information, prior studies have employed motion…

Robotics · Computer Science 2025-03-04 Ruiqi Yu , Qianshi Wang , Yizhen Wang , Zhicheng Wang , Jun Wu , Qiuguo Zhu

Accurate traversability estimation is essential for safe and effective navigation of outdoor robots operating in complex environments. This paper introduces a novel experience-based method that allows robots to autonomously learn which…

Accurate traversability estimation using an online dense terrain map is crucial for safe navigation in challenging environments like construction and disaster areas. However, traversability estimation for legged robots on rough terrains…

Although haptic sensing has recently been used for legged robot localization in extreme environments where a camera or LiDAR might fail, the problem of efficiently representing the haptic signatures in a learned prior map is still open.…

Robotics · Computer Science 2023-05-30 Damian Sójka , Michał R. Nowicki , Piotr Skrzypczyński

We propose a novel method, ProNav, which uses proprioceptive signals for traversability estimation in challenging outdoor terrains for autonomous legged robot navigation. Our approach uses sensor data from a legged robot's joint encoders,…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-01-30 Mohamed Elnoor , Adarsh Jagan Sathyamoorthy , Kasun Weerakoon , Dinesh Manocha

Quadruped robots must exhibit robust walking capabilities in practical applications. In this work, we propose a novel approach that enables quadruped robots to pass various small obstacles, or "tiny traps". Existing methods often rely on…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-09-13 Shaoting Zhu , Runhan Huang , Linzhan Mou , Hang Zhao

Accurate and precise terrain estimation is a difficult problem for robot locomotion in real-world environments. Thus, it is useful to have systems that do not depend on accurate estimation to the point of fragility. In this paper, we…

Robotics · Computer Science 2021-05-19 Jonah Siekmann , Kevin Green , John Warila , Alan Fern , Jonathan Hurst

The equations of motion governing mobile robots are dependent on terrain properties such as the coefficient of friction, and contact model parameters. Estimating these properties is thus essential for robotic navigation. Ideally any map…

Robotics · Computer Science 2022-05-26 Parker Ewen , Adam Li , Yuxin Chen , Steven Hong , Ram Vasudevan

Terrain Classification is an essential task in space exploration, where unpredictable environments are difficult to observe using only exteroceptive sensors such as vision. Implementing Neural Network classifiers can have high performance…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-07-04 Mariela De Lucas Álvarez , Jichen Guo , Raul Domínguez , Matias Valdenegro-Toro