Related papers: Towards Terrain-Aware Safe Locomotion for Quadrupe…
Reliable odometry for legged robots without cameras or LiDAR remains challenging due to IMU drift and noisy joint velocity sensing. This paper presents a purely proprioceptive state estimator that uses only IMU and motor measurements to…
Passive deformation due to compliance is a commonly used benefit of soft robots, providing opportunities to achieve robust actuation with few active degrees of freedom. Soft growing robots in particular have shown promise in navigation of…
Legged robots carry an IMU, but the inertial solution drifts because consumer-grade IMUs are noisy. However, the feet create intermittent contacts with the environment that can be used to mitigate that drift. This report develops a sequence…
Micro-scale continuum robots face significant limitations in achieving three-dimensional contact force perception, primarily due to structural miniaturization, nonlinear mechanical, and sensor integration. To overcome these limitations,…
This paper addresses the problem of legged locomotion in non-flat terrain. As legged robots such as quadrupeds are to be deployed in terrains with geometries which are difficult to model and predict, the need arises to equip them with the…
Soft robotics is a modern robotic paradigm for performing dexterous interactions with the surroundings via morphological flexibility. The desire for autonomous operation requires soft robots to be capable of proprioception and makes it…
In this paper, we present a framework rooted in control and planning that enables quadrupedal robots to traverse challenging terrains with discrete footholds using visual feedback. Navigating discrete terrain is challenging for quadrupeds…
Direct physical guidance is a natural means of teaching and interacting with robots, and robotic skins make a key contribution by enabling sensitive contact sensing and localization. This paper presents a tactile-proprioceptive sensor…
Autonomous locomotion for mobile ground robots in unstructured environments such as waypoint navigation or flipper control requires a sufficiently accurate prediction of the robot-terrain interaction. Heuristics like occupancy grids or…
In this paper, we propose a locomotion training framework where a control policy and a state estimator are trained concurrently. The framework consists of a policy network which outputs the desired joint positions and a state estimation…
Stabilizing legged robot locomotion on a dynamic rigid surface (DRS) (i.e., rigid surface that moves in the inertial frame) is a complex planning and control problem. The complexity arises due to the hybrid nonlinear walking dynamics…
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…
In this paper, we propose a robust controller that achieves natural and stably fast locomotion on a real blind quadruped robot. With only proprioceptive information, the quadruped robot can move at a maximum speed of 10 times its body…
Agile-legged robots have proven to be highly effective in navigating and performing tasks in complex and challenging environments, including disaster zones and industrial settings. However, these applications normally require the capability…
As both legged robots and embedded compute have become more capable, researchers have started to focus on field deployment of these robots. Robust autonomy in unstructured environments requires perception of the world around the robot in…
Recent advances in quadrupedal robots have demonstrated impressive agility and the ability to traverse diverse terrains. However, hardware issues, such as motor overheating or joint locking, may occur during long-distance walking or…
Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) controllers for quadrupedal locomotion have demonstrated impressive performance on challenging terrains, allowing robots to execute complex skills such as climbing, running, and jumping. However, existing…
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…
The quality of the visual feedback can vary significantly on a legged robot that is meant to traverse unknown and unstructured terrains. The map of the environment, acquired with online state-of-the-art algorithms, often degrades after a…
Humanoid and legged robots interact with the environment through intermittent contacts, making accurate motion estimation fundamentally dependent on reasoning about contact dynamics. However, standard sensing pipelines-whether based on…