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While single-agent legged locomotion has witnessed remarkable progress, individual robots remain fundamentally constrained by physical actuation limits. To transcend these boundaries, we introduce Co-jump, a cooperative task where two…
In nature, animals with exceptional locomotion abilities, such as cougars, often possess asymmetric fore and hind legs. This observation inspired us: could optimizing the leg length of quadruped robots endow them with similar locomotive…
Generating dynamic jumping motions on legged robots remains a challenging control problem as the full flight phase and large landing impact are expected. Compared to quadrupedal robots or other multi-legged robots, bipedal robots place…
In robotics, structural design and behavior optimization have long been considered separate processes, resulting in the development of systems with limited capabilities. Recently, co-design methods have gained popularity, where bi-level…
Wheel-legged robots with integrated manipulators hold great promise for mobile manipulation in logistics, industrial automation, and human-robot collaboration. However, unified control of such systems remains challenging due to the…
While simulation is vital for optimizing robotic systems, the cost of modeling deformable terrain has long limited its use in full-vehicle studies of off-road autonomous mobility. For example, Discrete Element Method (DEM) simulations are…
This work provides a complete framework for the simulation, co-optimization, and sim-to-real transfer of the design and control of soft legged robots. The compliance of soft robots provides a form of "mechanical intelligence" -- the ability…
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…
Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots over their wheeled counterparts on rough and uneven…
Hybrid track/wheel-legged robots combine the advantages of wheel-based and leg-based locomotion, granting adaptability across varied terrains through efficient transitions between rolling and walking modes. However, automating these…
Legged robots offer several advantages when navigating unstructured environments, but they often fall short of the efficiency achieved by wheeled robots. One promising strategy to improve their energy economy is to leverage their natural…
The performance of legged robots depends strongly on both mechanical design and control, motivating co-design approaches that jointly optimize these parameters. However, most existing co-design studies focus on optimizing link dimensions…
Wheeled bipedal robots (WBRs) have the capability to execute agile and versatile locomotion tasks. This paper focuses on improving the dynamic performance of WBRs through innovations in both hardware and software development. Inspired by…
Achieving controlled jumping behaviour for a quadruped robot is a challenging task, especially when introducing passive compliance in mechanical design. This study addresses this challenge via imitation-based deep reinforcement learning…
Skateboards offer a compact and efficient means of transportation as a type of personal mobility device. However, controlling them with legged robots poses several challenges for policy learning due to perception-driven interactions and…
Compliant robotics have seen successful applications in energy efficient locomotion and cyclic manipulation. However, exploitation of variable physical impedance for energy efficient sequential movements has not been extensively addressed.…
Designing robot morphologies and kinematics has traditionally relied on human intuition, with little systematic foundation. Motion-design co-optimization offers a promising path toward automation, but two major challenges remain: (i) the…
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…
This article propose a whole-body impedance coordinative control framework for a wheel-legged humanoid robot to achieve adaptability on complex terrains while maintaining robot upper body stability. The framework contains a bi-level control…
Ergonomics is a key factor to consider when designing control architectures for effective physical collaborations between humans and humanoid robots. In contrast, ergonomic indexes are often overlooked in the robot design phase, which leads…