Related papers: Soft Responsive Materials Enhance Humanoid Safety
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…
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…
Although soft robots show safer interactions with their environment than traditional robots, soft mechanisms and actuators still have significant potential for damage or degradation particularly during unmodeled contact. This article…
Nowadays, robots are increasingly operated in environments shared with humans, where conflicts between human and robot behaviors may compromise safety. This paper presents a proactive behavioral conflict avoidance framework based on the…
Hybrid rigid-soft robots combine the precision of rigid manipulators with the compliance and adaptability of soft arms, offering a promising approach for versatile grasping in unstructured environments. However, coordinating hybrid robots…
Deployment of Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms for robotics applications in the real world requires ensuring the safety of the robot and its environment. Safe Robot RL (SRRL) is a crucial step towards achieving human-robot…
Humanoid robots hold great promise in assisting humans in diverse environments and tasks, due to their flexibility and adaptability leveraging human-like morphology. However, research in humanoid robots is often bottlenecked by the costly…
Humanoids are versatile robotic platforms owing to their limbs with multiple degrees of freedom. Although humanoids can walk like humans, they are relatively slow, and cannot run over large barriers. To address these limitations, we aim to…
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…
Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots over their wheeled counterparts on rough and uneven…
Reprogrammable mechanical metamaterials, composed of a lattice of discretely adaptive elements, are emerging as a promising platform for mechanical intelligence. To operate in unknown environments, such structures must go beyond passive…
The increasing use of drones in human-centric applications highlights the need for designs that can survive collisions and recover rapidly, minimizing risks to both humans and the environment. We present HoLoArm, a quadrotor with compliant…
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…
Whole-body manipulation (WBM) for humanoid robots presents a promising approach for executing embracing tasks involving bulky objects, where traditional grasping relying on end-effectors only remains limited in such scenarios due to…
Soft robots have a myriad of potentials because of their intrinsically compliant bodies, enabling safe interactions with humans and adaptability to unpredictable environments. However, most of them have limited actuation speeds, require…
Human-robot collaboration in construction is often challenged by limited robot-to-human communication and the need to adapt to tolerance accumulation arising from material and assembly uncertainties. We present an adaptive human-robot…
While significant research progress has been made in robot learning for control, unique challenges arise when simultaneously co-optimizing morphology. Existing work has typically been tailored for particular environments or representations.…
Incorporating both flexible and rigid components in robot designs offers a unique solution to the limitations of traditional rigid robotics by enabling both compliance and strength. This paper explores the challenges and solutions for…
Soft robots are typically approximated as low-dimensional systems, especially when learning-based methods are used. This leads to models that are limited in their capability to predict the large number of deformation modes and interactions…
Realizing interactive whole-body control for multi-humanoid systems is critical for unlocking complex collaborative capabilities in shared environments. Although recent advancements have significantly enhanced the agility of individual…