Related papers: Energy Prediction on Sloping Ground for Quadruped …
Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured terrain. However, as planetary robots' power and thermal…
Control of systems of automated guided vehicles involves action planning at many levels. For efficient control of these systems, accurate estimation of cost parameters (speed, energy, task completion performance, \textit{et~cetera} is…
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 robot locomotion requires the planning of stable reference trajectories, especially while traversing uneven terrain. The proposed trajectory optimization framework is capable of generating dynamically stable base and footstep…
Effective locomotion in nature happens by transitioning across multiple modes (e.g., walk, run, climb). Despite this, far more mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion has been on how to generate and stabilize around…
Unknown dynamic load carrying is one important practical application for quadruped robots. Such a problem is non-trivial, posing three major challenges in quadruped locomotion control. First, how to model or represent the dynamics of the…
Planning whole-body motions while taking into account the terrain conditions is a challenging problem for legged robots since the terrain model might produce many local minima. Our coupled planning method uses stochastic and…
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…
This paper is dedicated to the development of a novel adaptive torsion spring mechanism for optimizing energy consumption in legged robots. By adjusting the equilibrium position and stiffness of the spring, the system improves energy…
Quadrupedal locomotion over complex terrain has been a long-standing research topic in robotics. While recent reinforcement learning-based locomotion methods improve generalizability and foot-placement precision, they rely on implicit…
Hopping robots often lose balance on slopes because the tilted ground creates unwanted rotation at landing. This work analyzes that effect using a simple spring mass model and identifies how slope induced impulses destabilize the robot. To…
We propose an online motion planner for legged robot locomotion with the primary objective of achieving energy efficiency. The conceptual idea is to leverage a placement set of footstep positions based on the robot's body position to…
The optimal traverse of irregular terrains made by ground mobile robots heavily depends on the adequacy of the cost models used to plan the path they follow. The criteria to define optimality may be based on minimizing energy consumption…
We present a model-based framework for robot locomotion that achieves walking based on only 4.5 minutes (45,000 control steps) of data collected on a quadruped robot. To accurately model the robot's dynamics over a long horizon, we…
Legged robots leverage ground contacts and the reaction forces they provide to achieve agile locomotion. However, uncertainty coupled with contact discontinuities can lead to failure, especially in real-world environments with unexpected…
As mobile robots find increasing use in outdoor applications, designing energy-efficient robot navigation algorithms is gaining importance. There are two primary approaches to energy efficient navigation: Offline approaches rely on a…
In this paper, with a view toward fast deployment of locomotion gaits in low-cost hardware, we use a linear policy for realizing end-foot trajectories in the quadruped robot, Stoch $2$. In particular, the parameters of the end-foot…
Planetary exploration missions require robots capable of navigating extreme and unknown environments. While wheeled rovers have dominated past missions, their mobility is limited to traversable surfaces. Legged robots, especially…
Unlike their biological cousins, the majority of existing quadrupedal robots are constructed with rigid chassis. This results in motion that is either beetle-like or distinctly robotic, lacking the natural fluidity characteristic of…
Legged robots must adapt their gait to navigate unpredictable environments, a challenge that animals master with ease. However, most deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches to quadruped locomotion rely on a fixed gait, limiting…