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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…
Legged robots need to make contact with irregular surfaces, when operating in unstructured natural terrains. Representing and perceiving these areas to reason about potential contact between a robot and its surrounding environment, is still…
Search and rescue (SAR) robots are required to quickly traverse terrain and perform high-force rescue tasks, necessitating both terrain adaptability and controlled high-force output. Few platforms exist today for SAR, and fewer still have…
Recent progress in legged locomotion has allowed highly dynamic and parkour-like behaviors for robots, similar to their biological counterparts. Yet, these methods mostly rely on egocentric (first-person) perception, limiting their…
How are robots becoming smarter at interacting with their surroundings? Recent advances have reshaped how robots use tactile sensing to perceive and engage with the world. Tactile sensing is a game-changer, allowing robots to embed…
Achieving stable bipedal walking on surfaces with unknown motion remains a challenging control problem due to the hybrid, time-varying, partially unknown dynamics of the robot and the difficulty of accurate state and surface motion…
Quadruped robots are machines intended for challenging and harsh environments. Despite the progress in locomotion strategy, safely recovering from unexpected falls or planned drops is still an open problem. It is further made more difficult…
Traversing 3-D complex environments has always been a significant challenge for legged locomotion. Existing methods typically rely on external sensors such as vision and lidar to preemptively react to obstacles by acquiring environmental…
Designing robots capable of traversing uneven terrain and overcoming physical obstacles has been a longstanding challenge in the field of robotics. Walking robots show promise in this regard due to their agility, redundant DOFs and…
Distributed tactile sensing for multi-force detection is crucial for various aerial robot interaction tasks. However, current contact sensing solutions on drones only exploit single end-effector sensors and cannot provide distributed…
The design of physical compliance -- its location, degree, and structure -- affects robot performance and robustness in contact-rich tasks. While compliance is often used in the robot's joints, flange, or end-effector, this paper proposes…
Quadrupedal robots resemble the physical ability of legged animals to walk through unstructured terrains. However, designing a controller for quadrupedal robots poses a significant challenge due to their functional complexity and requires…
Wireless communication-based multi-robot systems open the door to cyberattacks that can disrupt safety and performance of collaborative robots. The physical channel supporting inter-robot communication offers an attractive opportunity to…
We present an open-source untethered quadrupedal soft robot platform for dynamic locomotion (e.g., high-speed running and backflipping). The robot is mostly soft (80 vol.%) while driven by four geared servo motors. The robot's soft body and…
In-situ aeroengine maintenance works are highly beneficial as it can significantly reduce the current maintenance cycle which is extensive and costly due to the disassembly requirement of engines from aircrafts. However, navigating in/out…
Quadruped robots are currently a widespread platform for robotics research, thanks to powerful Reinforcement Learning controllers and the availability of cheap and robust commercial platforms. However, to broaden the adoption of the…
In the context of legged robots, adaptive behavior involves adaptive balancing and adaptive swing foot reflection. While adaptive balancing counteracts perturbations to the robot, adaptive swing foot reflection helps the robot to navigate…
Soft robots are intrinsically capable of adapting to different environments by changing their shape in response to interaction forces with the environment. However, sensing and feedback are still required for higher level decisions and…
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…
Collision-free motion is often aided by tactile and proximity sensors distributed on the body of the robot due to their resistance to occlusion as opposed to external cameras. However, how to shape the sensor's properties, such as sensing…