Related papers: Soft Surfaced Vision-Based Tactile Sensing for Bip…

Legged robots face significant challenges in moving and navigating on deformable and highly yielding terrain such as mud. We present a resistive force model for legged foot-mud interactions. The model captures rheological behaviors such as…

Biped robots usually adopt feet with a rigid structure that simplifies walking on flat grounds and yet hinders ground adaptation in unstructured environments, thus jeopardizing stability. We recently explored in the SoftFoot the idea of…

(Simplified Abstract) To accomplish breakthroughs in dynamic whole-body locomotion, legged robots have to be terrain aware. Terrain-Aware Locomotion (TAL) implies that the robot can perceive the terrain with its sensors, and can take…

Perception is essential for the active interaction of physical agents with the external environment. The integration of multiple sensory modalities, such as touch and vision, enhances this perceptual process, creating a more comprehensive…

Soft robotic fingers can improve adaptability in grasping and manipulation, compensating for geometric variation in object or environmental contact, but today lack force capacity and fine dexterity. Integrated tactile sensors can provide…

We exploit the complementary strengths of vision and proprioception to develop a point-goal navigation system for legged robots, called VP-Nav. Legged systems are capable of traversing more complex terrain than wheeled robots, but to fully…

Multimodal tactile sensing could potentially enable robots to improve their performance at manipulation tasks by rapidly discriminating between task-relevant objects. Data-driven approaches to this tactile perception problem show promise,…

In-situ robotic exploration is an important tool for advancing knowledge of geological processes that describe the Earth and other Planetary bodies. To inform and enhance operations for these roving laboratories, it is imperative to…

Skin-like tactile sensors provide robots with rich feedback related to the force distribution applied to their soft surface. The complexity of interpreting raw tactile information has driven the use of machine learning algorithms to convert…

Soft robots offer significant advantages in adaptability, safety, and dexterity compared to conventional rigid-body robots. However, it is challenging to equip soft robots with accurate proprioception and tactile sensing due to their high…

Legged robot locomotion is a challenging task due to a myriad of sub-problems, such as the hybrid dynamics of foot contact and the effects of the desired gait on the terrain. Accurate and efficient state estimation of the floating base and…

Much current study of legged locomotion has rightly focused on foot traction forces, including on granular media. Future legged millirobots will need to go through terrain, such as brush or other vegetation, where the body contact forces…

We present a novel control strategy for dynamic legged locomotion in complex scenarios, that considers information about the morphology of the terrain in contexts when only on-board mapping and computation are available. The strategy is…

Tactile sensors can provide detailed contact in-formation that can facilitate robots to perform dexterous, in-hand manipulation tasks. One of the primitive but important tasks is surface following that is a key feature for robots while…

In essence, successful grasp boils down to correct responses to multiple contact events between fingertips and objects. In most scenarios, tactile sensing is adequate to distinguish contact events. Due to the nature of high dimensionality…

With the development of robot electronic skin technology, various tactile sensors, enhanced by AI, are unlocking a new dimension of perception for robots. In this work, we explore how robots equipped with electronic skin can recognize…

Vision-based tactile sensors, through high-resolution optical measurements, can effectively perceive the geometric shape of objects and the force information during the contact process, thus helping robots acquire higher-dimensional tactile…

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…

Multi-legged mobile robots possess high mobility performance in rough terrain environments, stemming from their high postural stability, joint flexibility, and the redundancy provided by multiple legs. In prior research on navigating…

In this paper, we present a methodology that uses an optical tactile sensor for efficient tactile exploration of embedded objects within soft materials. The methodology consists of an exploration phase, where a probabilistic estimate of the…