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Humanoid robots are made to resemble humans but their locomotion abilities are far from ours in terms of agility and versatility. When humans walk on complex terrains, or face external disturbances, they combine a set of strategies,…

Quadruped animals are capable of exhibiting a diverse range of locomotion gaits. While progress has been made in demonstrating such gaits on robots, current methods rely on motion priors, dynamics models, or other forms of extensive manual…

Animals can finely modulate their leg stiffness to interact with complex terrains and absorb sudden shocks. In feats like leaping and sprinting, animals demonstrate a sophisticated interplay of opposing muscle pairs that actively modulate…

We present a decentralized and scalable approach for deployment of a robot swarm. Our approach tackles scenarios in which the swarm must reach multiple spatially distributed targets, and enforce the constraint that the robot network cannot…

Modular robotics holds immense potential for space exploration, where reliability, repairability, and reusability are critical for cost-effective missions. Coordination between heterogeneous units is paramount for precision tasks -- whether…

Optimizing gait stability for legged robots is a difficult problem. Even on level surfaces, effectively traversing across different textures (e.g., carpet) rests on dynamically tuning parameters in multidimensional space. Inspired by…

Despite many accomplishments by legged robot designers, state-of-the-art bipedal robots are prone to falling over, cannot negotiate extremely rough terrains and cannot directly regulate unilateral contact forces. Our objective is to…

Robotic collaborative carrying could greatly benefit human activities like warehouse and construction site management. However, coordinating the simultaneous motion of multiple robots represents a significant challenge. Existing works…

The integration of Supernumerary Limbs (SLs) on humanoid robots poses a significant stability challenge due to the dynamic perturbations they introduce. This thesis addresses this issue by designing a novel hierarchical control architecture…

Snake robots offer considerable potential for endoscopic interventions due to their ability to follow curvilinear paths. Telemanipulation is an open problem due to hyper-redundancy, as input devices only allow a specification of six degrees…

During learning trials, systems are exposed to different failure conditions which may break robotic parts before a safe behavior is discovered. Humans contour this problem by grounding their learning to a safer structure/control first and…

Developing natural and diverse locomotion controllers for quadruped robots that can adapt to complex terrains while preserving motion style remains a significant challenge. Existing imitation-based methods face a fundamental optimization…

This paper presents a novel methodology to model and optimize trajectories of a quadrupedal robot with spinal compliance to improve standing jump performance compared to quadrupeds with a rigid spine. We introduce an elastic model for a…

This paper studies capturability and push recovery for quadrupedal locomotion. Despite the rich literature on capturability analysis and push recovery control for legged robots, existing tools are developed mainly for bipeds or humanoids.…

Quadruped robots are progressively being integrated into human environments. Despite the growing locomotion capabilities of quadrupedal robots, their interaction with objects in realistic scenes is still limited. While additional robotic…

Legged robots have great potential to perform loco-manipulation tasks, yet it is challenging to keep the robot balanced while it interacts with the environment. In this paper we study the use of additional contact points for maximising the…

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…

Multilegged robots have the ability to perform stable locomotion on relatively rough terrain. However, the complexity of legged robots over wheeled or tracked robots make them difficult to control. This paper presents OpenSHC (Open-source…

Snakes can traverse almost all types of environments by bending their elongate bodies in 3-D to interact with the terrain. Similarly, a snake robot is a promising platform to perform critical tasks in various environments. Understanding how…

Limbless animals such as snakes, limbless lizards, worms, eels, and lampreys move their slender, long bodies in three dimensions to traverse diverse environments. Accurately quantifying their continuous body's 3-D shape and motion is…