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Most locomotion methods for humanoid robots focus on leg-based gaits, yet natural bipeds frequently rely on hands, knees, and elbows to establish additional contacts for stability and support in complex environments. This paper introduces…
To traverse complex scenarios reliably a legged robot needs to move its base aided by the ground reaction forces, which can only be generated by the legs that are momentarily in contact with the ground. A proper selection of footholds is…
We introduce Berkeley Humanoid, a reliable and low-cost mid-scale humanoid research platform for learning-based control. Our lightweight, in-house-built robot is designed specifically for learning algorithms with low simulation complexity,…
Most autonomous navigation systems assume wheeled robots are rigid bodies and their 2D planar workspaces can be divided into free spaces and obstacles. However, recent wheeled mobility research, showing that wheeled platforms have the…
Humans excel at robust bipedal walking in complex natural environments. In each step, they adequately tune the interaction of biomechanical muscle dynamics and neuronal signals to be robust against uncertainties in ground conditions.…
The enhanced mobility brought by legged locomotion empowers quadrupedal robots to navigate through complex and unstructured environments. However, optimizing agile locomotion while accounting for the varying energy costs of traversing…
Parkour is a grand challenge for legged locomotion that requires robots to overcome various obstacles rapidly in complex environments. Existing methods can generate either diverse but blind locomotion skills or vision-based but specialized…
Bipedal locomotion makes humanoid robots inherently prone to falls, causing catastrophic damage to the expensive sensors, actuators, and structural components of full-scale robots. To address this critical barrier to real-world deployment,…
Falling is an inherent risk of humanoid mobility. Maintaining stability is thus a primary safety focus in robot control and learning, yet no existing approach fully averts loss of balance. When instability does occur, prior work addresses…
Bipedal robots promise the ability to traverse rough terrain quickly and efficiently, and indeed, humanoid robots can now use strong ankles and careful foot placement to traverse discontinuous terrain. However, more agile underactuated…
In this paper, we consider a general task of jumping varying distances and heights for a quadrupedal robot in noisy environments, such as off of uneven terrain and with variable robot dynamics parameters. To accurately jump in such…
Reinforcement learning methods can achieve significant performance but require a large amount of training data collected on the same robotic platform. A policy trained with expensive data is rendered useless after making even a minor change…
Humanoid robots hold great potential for diverse interactions and daily service tasks within human-centered environments, necessitating controllers that seamlessly integrate precise locomotion with dexterous manipulation. However, most…
Locomotion on dynamic rigid surface (i.e., rigid surface accelerating in an inertial frame) presents complex challenges for controller design, which are essential for deploying humanoid robots in dynamic real-world environments such as…
Humanoid robots maintain balance and navigate by controlling the contact wrenches applied to the environment. While it is possible to plan dynamically-feasible motion that applies appropriate wrenches using existing methods, a humanoid may…
We focus on agile, continuous, and terrain-adaptive jumping of quadrupedal robots in discontinuous terrains such as stairs and stepping stones. Unlike single-step jumping, continuous jumping requires accurately executing highly dynamic…
Climbing, crouching, bridging gaps, and walking up stairs are just a few of the advantages that quadruped robots have over wheeled robots, making them more suitable for navigating rough and unstructured terrain. However, executing such…
Humanoid robots, with their human-like morphology, hold great potential for industrial applications. However, existing loco-manipulation methods primarily focus on dexterous manipulation, falling short of the combined requirements for…
With the research into development of quadruped robots picking up pace, learning based techniques are being explored for developing locomotion controllers for such robots. A key problem is to generate leg trajectories for continuously…
Dynamic traversal of uneven terrain is a major objective in the field of legged robotics. The most recent model predictive control approaches for these systems can generate robust dynamic motion of short duration; however, planning over a…