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The remarkable athletic intelligence displayed by humans in complex dynamic movements such as dancing and gymnastics suggests that the balance mechanism in biological beings is decoupled from specific movement patterns. This decoupling…
Learning various motor skills for quadrupedal robots is a challenging problem that requires careful design of task-specific mathematical models or reward descriptions. In this work, we propose to learn a single capable policy using deep…
Balancing and push-recovery are essential capabilities enabling humanoid robots to solve complex locomotion tasks. In this context, classical control systems tend to be based on simplified physical models and hard-coded strategies. Although…
A critical need in assistive robotics, such as assistive wheelchairs for navigation, is a need to learn task intent and safety guarantees through user interactions in order to ensure safe task performance. For tasks where the objectives…
This paper presents a model-based balance stabilization system which takes into account not only the stable part of COM dynamics but also the unstable part. In this system, the overall dynamics of a humanoid robot is approximated using a…
The ability to achieve and maintain inverted poses is essential for unlocking the full agility of miniature blimp robots (MBRs). However, developing reliable inverted control strategies for MBRs remains challenging due to their complex and…
Legged robots are typically in rigid contact with the environment at multiple locations, which add a degree of complexity to their control. We present a method to control the motion and a subset of the contact forces of a floating-base…
Soft robots, compared to rigid robots, possess inherent advantages, including higher degrees of freedom, compliance, and enhanced safety, which have contributed to their increasing application across various fields. Among these benefits,…
Real-world applications require a robot operating in the physical world with awareness of potential risks besides accomplishing the task. A large part of risky behaviors arises from interacting with objects in ignorance of affordance. To…
Adaptive recovery from fall incidents are essential skills for the practical deployment of wheeled-legged robots, which uniquely combine the agility of legs with the speed of wheels for rapid recovery. However, traditional methods relying…
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…
Being able to transfer existing skills to new situations is a key capability when training robots to operate in unpredictable real-world environments. A successful transfer algorithm should not only minimize the number of samples that the…
Wearable robots are undergoing a disruptive transition, from the rigid machines that populated the science-fiction world in the early eighties to lightweight robotic apparel, hardly distinguishable from our daily clothes. In less than a…
This paper presents an innovative method for humanoid robots to acquire a comprehensive set of motor skills through reinforcement learning. The approach utilizes an achievement-triggered multi-path reward function rooted in developmental…
In recent years, legged and wheeled-legged robots have gained prominence for tasks in environments predominantly created for humans across various domains. One significant challenge faced by many of these robots is their limited capability…
As people learn to navigate the world, autonomic nervous system (e.g., "fight or flight") responses provide intrinsic feedback about the potential consequence of action choices (e.g., becoming nervous when close to a cliff edge or driving…
Safety is an essential component for deploying reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms in real-world scenarios, and is critical during the learning process itself. A natural first approach toward safe RL is to manually specify constraints on…
The security issue of mobile robots has attracted considerable attention in recent years. In this paper, we propose an intelligent physical attack to trap mobile robots into a preset position by learning the obstacle-avoidance mechanism…
Obtaining dynamic models of continuum soft robots is central to the analysis and control of soft robots, and researchers have devoted much attention to the challenge of proposing both data-driven and first-principle solutions. Both avenues…
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…