Related papers: Robot Crash Course: Learning Soft and Stylized Fal…

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,…

The ability to recover from an unexpected external perturbation is a fundamental motor skill in bipedal locomotion. An effective response includes the ability to not just recover balance and maintain stability but also to fall in a safe…

Humanoid robots have received significant research interests and advancements in recent years. Despite many successes, due to their morphology, dynamics and limitation of control policy, humanoid robots are prone to fall as compared to…

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…

Soft robotic manipulators offer operational advantage due to their compliant and deformable structures. However, their inherently nonlinear dynamics presents substantial challenges. Traditional analytical methods often depend on simplifying…

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…

Adaptive falling and recovery skills greatly extend the applicability of robot deployments. In the case of legged mobile manipulators, the robot arm could adaptively stop the fall and assist the recovery. Prior works on falling and recovery…

This paper presents a novel approach to fall prediction for bipedal robots, specifically targeting the detection of potential falls while standing caused by abrupt, incipient, and intermittent faults. Leveraging a 1D convolutional neural…

State-of-the-art reinforcement learning is now able to learn versatile locomotion, balancing and push-recovery capabilities for bipedal robots in simulation. Yet, the reality gap has mostly been overlooked and the simulated results hardly…

Planning under uncertainty is a crucial capability for autonomous systems to operate reliably in uncertain and dynamic environments. The concern of safety becomes even more critical in healthcare settings where robots interact with human…

Quadruped robots have shown remarkable mobility on various terrains through reinforcement learning. Yet, in the presence of sparse footholds and risky terrains such as stepping stones and balance beams, which require precise foot placement…

Model-based approaches for planning and control for bipedal locomotion have a long history of success. It can provide stability and safety guarantees while being effective in accomplishing many locomotion tasks. Model-free reinforcement…

Humanoid robots have attracted significant attention in recent years. Reinforcement Learning (RL) is one of the main ways to control the whole body of humanoid robots. RL enables agents to complete tasks by learning from environment…

Automatic fall recovery is a crucial prerequisite before humanoid robots can be reliably deployed. Hand-designing controllers for getting up is difficult because of the varied configurations a humanoid can end up in after a fall and the…

We present a footstep planning policy for quadrupedal locomotion that is able to directly take into consideration a-priori safety information in its decisions. At its core, a learning process analyzes terrain patches, classifying each…

Deep reinforcement learning has seen successful implementations on humanoid robots to achieve dynamic walking. However, these implementations have been so far successful in simple environments void of obstacles. In this paper, we aim to…

Enabling robots to walk and run on yielding terrain is increasingly vital to endeavors ranging from disaster response to extraterrestrial exploration. While dynamic legged locomotion on rigid ground is challenging enough, yielding terrain…

For the task with complicated manipulation in unstructured environments, traditional hand-coded methods are ineffective, while reinforcement learning can provide more general and useful policy. Although the reinforcement learning is able to…

Bipedal locomotion is a key challenge in robotics, particularly for robots like Bolt, which have a point-foot design. This study explores the control of such underactuated robots using constrained reinforcement learning, addressing their…

For legged robots to match the athletic capabilities of humans and animals, they must not only produce robust periodic walking and running, but also seamlessly switch between nominal locomotion gaits and more specialized transient…