Related papers: Autonomous Legged Mobile Manipulation for Lunar Su…
Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured terrain. However, as planetary robots' power and thermal…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Legged manipulators extend robotic capabilities beyond static manipulation by integrating agile locomotion with versatile arm control. However, achieving precise manipulation while maintaining coordinated locomotion remains a major…
Due to their ability to adapt to different terrains, quadruped robots have drawn much attention in the research field of robot learning. Legged mobile manipulation, where a quadruped robot is equipped with a robotic arm, can greatly enhance…
Legged robots have the potential to traverse complex terrain and access confined spaces beyond the reach of traditional platforms thanks to their ability to carefully select footholds and flexibly adapt their body posture while walking.…
Extraterrestrial rovers with a general-purpose robotic arm have many potential applications in lunar and planetary exploration. Introducing autonomy into such systems is desirable for increasing the time that rovers can spend gathering…
Legged robots are physically capable of traversing a wide range of challenging environments, but designing controllers that are sufficiently robust to handle this diversity has been a long-standing challenge in robotics. Reinforcement…
While quadruped robots usually have good stability and load capacity, bipedal robots offer a higher level of flexibility / adaptability to different tasks and environments. A multi-modal legged robot can take the best of both worlds. In…
Off-road navigation on vertically challenging terrain, involving steep slopes and rugged boulders, presents significant challenges for wheeled robots both at the planning level to achieve smooth collision-free trajectories and at the…
Robots can now learn how to make decisions and control themselves, generalizing learned behaviors to unseen scenarios. In particular, AI powered robots show promise in rough environments like the lunar surface, due to the environmental…
Quadruped robots are designed to achieve agile and robust locomotion by drawing inspiration from legged animals. However, most existing control methods for quadruped robots lack a key capacity observed in animals: the ability to exhibit…
Establishing lunar infrastructure is paramount to long-term habitation on the Moon. To meet the demand for future lunar infrastructure development, we present CraterGrader, a novel system for autonomous robotic earthmoving tasks within…
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…
The ability to efficiently and effectively explore planetary surfaces is currently limited by the capability of wheeled rovers to traverse challenging terrains, and by pre-programmed data acquisition plans with limited in-situ flexibility.…
Existing learning approaches to dexterous manipulation use demonstrations or interactions with the environment to train black-box neural networks that provide little control over how the robot learns the skills or how it would perform post…
Legged robots have shown remarkable advantages in navigating uneven terrain. However, realizing effective locomotion and manipulation tasks on quadruped robots is still challenging. In addition, object and terrain parameters are generally…
Designing control policies for legged locomotion is complex due to the under-actuated and non-continuous robot dynamics. Model-free reinforcement learning provides promising tools to tackle this challenge. However, a major bottleneck of…
Reinforcement learning (RL) has demonstrated impressive performance in legged locomotion over various challenging environments. However, due to the sim-to-real gap and lack of explainability, unconstrained RL policies deployed in the real…
Although wheeled robots have been predominant for planetary exploration, their geometry limits their capabilities when traveling over steep slopes, through rocky terrains, and in microgravity. Legged robots equipped with grippers are a…
The exploration of the lunar poles and the collection of samples from the martian surface are characterized by shorter time windows demanding increased autonomy and speeds. Autonomous mobile robots must intrinsically cope with a wider range…