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Impact-aware tasks (i.e. on purpose impacts) are not handled in multi-objective whole body controllers of hu-manoid robots. This leads to the fact that a humanoid robot typically operates at near-zero velocity to interact with the external…
Parkour is a grand challenge for legged locomotion, even for quadruped robots, requiring active perception and various maneuvers to overcome multiple challenging obstacles. Existing methods for humanoid locomotion either optimize a…
Air hockey is a highly reactive game which requires the player to quickly reason over stochastic puck and contact dynamics. We implement a hierarchical framework which combines stochastic optimal control for planning shooting angles and…
Soccer kicking is a complex whole-body motion that requires intricate coordination of various motor actions. To accomplish such dynamic motion in a humanoid robot, the robot needs to simultaneously: 1) transfer high kinetic energy to the…
This paper presents a hierarchical framework for Deep Reinforcement Learning that acquires motor skills for a variety of push recovery and balancing behaviors, i.e., ankle, hip, foot tilting, and stepping strategies. The policy is trained…
Humans can leverage hierarchical structures to split a task into sub-tasks and solve problems efficiently. Both imitation and reinforcement learning or a combination of them with hierarchical structures have been proven to be an efficient…
Intelligent behaviour in the physical world exhibits structure at multiple spatial and temporal scales. Although movements are ultimately executed at the level of instantaneous muscle tensions or joint torques, they must be selected to…
Human beings are particularly good at reasoning and inference from just a few examples. When facing new tasks, humans will leverage knowledge and skills learned before, and quickly integrate them with the new task. In addition to learning…
Humanoid soccer dribbling is a highly challenging task that demands dexterous ball manipulation while maintaining dynamic balance. Traditional rule-based methods often struggle to achieve accurate ball control due to their reliance on fixed…
Humanoid robots have demonstrated impressive motor skills in a wide range of tasks, yet whole-body control for humanlike long-time, dynamic fighting remains particularly challenging due to the stringent requirements on agility and…
Demonstrating acrobatic behavior of a humanoid robot such as flips and spinning jumps requires systematic approaches across hardware design, motion planning, and control. In this paper, we present a new humanoid robot design, an…
Athletics are a quintessential and universal expression of humanity. From French monks who in the 12th century invented jeu de paume, the precursor to modern lawn tennis, back to the K'iche' people who played the Maya Ballgame as a form of…
Throwing with a legged robot involves precise coordination of object manipulation and locomotion - crucial for advanced real-world interactions. Most research focuses on either manipulation or locomotion, with minimal exploration of tasks…
Humanoid robots are machines built with an anthropomorphic shape. Despite decades of research into the subject, it is still challenging to tackle the robot locomotion problem from an algorithmic point of view. For example, these machines…
Planning the motion for humanoid robots is a computationally-complex task due to the high dimensionality of the system. Thus, a common approach is to first plan in the low-dimensional space induced by the robot's feet---a task referred to…
It is well established that humans decision making and instrumental control uses multiple systems, some which use habitual action selection and some which require deliberate planning. Deliberate planning systems use predictions of…
Humans can produce complex whole-body motions when interacting with their surroundings, by planning, executing and combining individual limb movements. We investigated this fundamental aspect of motor control in the setting of autonomous…
Humanoid robots that can autonomously operate in diverse environments have the potential to help address labour shortages in factories, assist elderly at homes, and colonize new planets. While classical controllers for humanoid robots have…
Cooperative table-carrying is a complex task due to the continuous nature of the action and state-spaces, multimodality of strategies, and the need for instantaneous adaptation to other agents. In this work, we present a method for…
Running up stairs is effortless for humans but remains extremely challenging for humanoid robots due to the simultaneous requirements of high agility and strict stability. Model-free reinforcement learning (RL) can generate dynamic…