Related papers: RoMoCo: Robotic Motion Control Toolbox for Reduced…

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…

In recent years, the field of legged robotics has seen growing interest in enhancing the capabilities of these robots through the integration of articulated robotic arms. However, achieving successful loco-manipulation, especially involving…

Modular small-scale robots offer the potential for on-demand assembly and disassembly, enabling task-specific adaptation in dynamic and constrained environments. However, existing modular magnetic platforms often depend on workspace…

The general problem of planning feasible trajectories for multimodal robots is still an open challenge. This paper presents a whole-body trajectory optimisation approach that addresses this challenge by combining methods and tools developed…

We consider low-order controller design for large-scale linear time-invariant dynamical systems with inputs and outputs. Model order reduction is a popular technique, but controllers designed for reduced-order models may result in unstable…

Locomotion is a fundamental skill for humanoid robots. However, most existing works make locomotion a single, tedious, unextendable, and unconstrained movement. This limits the kinematic capabilities of humanoid robots. In contrast, humans…

Legged robots are increasingly entering new domains and applications, including search and rescue, inspection, and logistics. However, for such systems to be valuable in real-world scenarios, they must be able to autonomously and robustly…

We present DisCo, a distributed algorithm for contact-rich, multi-robot tasks. DisCo is a distributed contact-implicit trajectory optimization algorithm, which allows a group of robots to optimize a time sequence of forces to objects and to…

Humans perform everyday tasks using a combination of locomotion and manipulation skills. Building a system that can handle both skills is essential to creating virtual humans. We present a physically-simulated human capable of solving box…

In this letter, we propose an efficient and highly versatile loco-manipulation planning for humanoid robots. Loco-manipulation planning is a key technological brick enabling humanoid robots to autonomously perform object transportation by…

Nonlinear model predictive locomotion controllers based on the reduced centroidal dynamics are nowadays ubiquitous in legged robots. These schemes, even if they assume an inherent simplification of the robot's dynamics, were shown to endow…

Natural organisms utilize distributed actuation through their musculoskeletal systems to adapt their gait for traversing diverse terrains or to morph their bodies for varied tasks. A longstanding challenge in robotics is to emulate this…

Humanoid robots often face significant balance issues due to the motion of their heavy limbs. These challenges are particularly pronounced when attempting dynamic motion or operating in environments with irregular terrain. To address this…

This letter presents a novel coarse-to-fine motion planning framework for robotic manipulation in cluttered, unmodeled environments. The system integrates a dual-camera perception setup with a B-spline-based model predictive control (MPC)…

We present an integrated approach to locomotion and balancing of humanoid robots based on direct centroidal control. Our method uses a five-mass description of a humanoid. It generates whole-body motions from desired foot trajectories and…

Robots are often built from standardized assemblies, (e.g. arms, legs, or fingers), but each robot must be trained from scratch to control all the actuators of all the parts together. In this paper we demonstrate a new approach that takes a…

Several recently released humanoid robots, inspired by the mechanical design of Cassie, employ actuator configurations in which the motors are displaced from the joints to reduce leg inertia. While studies accounting for the full kinematic…

Multilegged robots have the ability to perform stable locomotion on relatively rough terrain. However, the complexity of legged robots over wheeled or tracked robots make them difficult to control. This paper presents OpenSHC (Open-source…

We explore Calico, a miniature relocatable wearable system with fast and precise locomotion for on-body interaction, actuation and sensing. Calico consists of a two-wheel robot and an on-cloth track mechanism or "railway," on which the…

Humans are able to negotiate downstep behaviors -- both planned and unplanned -- with remarkable agility and ease. The goal of this paper is to systematically study the translation of this human behavior to bipedal walking robots, even if…