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Collapsing terrains, often present in search and rescue missions or planetary exploration, pose significant challenges for quadruped robots. This paper introduces a robust locomotion framework for safe navigation over unstable surfaces by…
Robots that physically interact with their surroundings, in order to accomplish some tasks or assist humans in their activities, require to exploit contact forces in a safe and proficient manner. Impedance control is considered as a…
The ability to modify morphology in response to environmental changes represents a highly advantageous feature in biological organisms, facilitating their adaptation to diverse environmental conditions. While some robots have the capability…
The dynamical properties of tensegrity robots give them appealing ruggedness and adaptability, but present major challenges with respect to locomotion control. Due to high-dimensionality and complex contact responses, data-driven approaches…
This work presents a method of incorporating low-cost capacitive tactile sensors on a soft socially assistive robot platform. By embedding conductive thread into the robot's crocheted exterior, we formed a set of low-cost, flexible…
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…
Animals run robustly in diverse terrain. This locomotion robustness is puzzling because axon conduction velocity is limited to a few ten meters per second. If reflex loops deliver sensory information with significant delays, one would…
Frictional contact has been extensively studied as the core underlying behavior of legged locomotion and manipulation, and its nearly-discontinuous nature makes planning and control difficult even when an accurate model of the robot is…
This paper studies the multi-robot reliable navigation problem in uncertain topological networks, which aims at maximizing the robot team's on-time arrival probabilities in the face of road network uncertainties. The uncertainty in these…
The recent development of novel aerial vehicles capable of physically interacting with the environment leads to new applications such as contact-based inspection. These tasks require the robotic system to exchange forces with…
A distinctive feature of quadrupeds that is integral to their locomotion is the tail. Tails serve many purposes in biological systems including propulsion, counterbalance, and stabilization while walking, running, climbing, or jumping.…
Robotics plays a pivotal role in planetary science and exploration, where autonomous and reliable systems are crucial due to the risks and challenges inherent to space environments. The establishment of permanent lunar bases demands robotic…
While the transport of matter by wheeled vehicles or legged robots can be guaranteed in engineered landscapes like roads or rails, locomotion prediction in complex environments like collapsed buildings or crop fields remains challenging.…
As more robots are implemented for contact-rich tasks, tactile sensors are in increasing demand. For many circumstances, the contact is required to be compliant, and soft sensors are in need. This paper introduces a novelly designed soft…
Current methods for estimating force from tactile sensor signals are either inaccurate analytic models or task-specific learned models. In this paper, we explore learning a robust model that maps tactile sensor signals to force. We…
Ground robots require the crucial capability of traversing unstructured and unprepared terrains and avoiding obstacles to complete tasks in real-world robotics applications such as disaster response. When a robot operates in off-road field…
Touch sensing can help robots understand their sur- rounding environment, and in particular the objects they interact with. To this end, roboticists have, in the last few decades, developed several tactile sensing solutions, extensively…
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…
Modular robots offer reconfigurability and fault tolerance essential for lunar missions, but require controllers that adapt safely to real-world disturbances. We build on our previous hardware-agnostic actuator synchronization in Motion…
In this article, we propose a deep learning framework that provides a unified approach to the problem of leg contact detection in humanoid robot walking gaits. Our formulation accomplishes to accurately and robustly estimate the contact…