Related papers: Natural Locomotion: Principle and Method

Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear…

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…

We investigate a concept of passive, vibration-driven locomotion, in which a mechanical system achieves horizontal self-propulsion by resonantly harvesting energy from vertical environmental excitations (e.g. ambient vibrations of…

This study explores the dynamics of asymmetrical bounding gaits in quadrupedal robots, focusing on the integration of torso pitching and hip motion to enhance speed and stability. Traditional control strategies often enforce a fixed…

To traverse complex three-dimensional terrainwith large obstacles, animals and robots must transition across different modes. However, the most mechanistic understanding of terrestrial locomotion concerns how to generate and stabilize…

Inspired by the vertebrate branch of the animal kingdom, articulated soft robots are robotic systems embedding elastic elements into a classic rigid (skeleton-like) structure. Leveraging on their bodies elasticity, soft robots promise to…

Legged locomotion is commonly studied and expressed as a discrete set of gait patterns, like walk, trot, gallop, which are usually treated as given and pre-programmed in legged robots for efficient locomotion at different speeds. However,…

Learning controllers that reproduce legged locomotion in nature has been a long-time goal in robotics and computer graphics. While yielding promising results, recent approaches are not yet flexible enough to be applicable to legged systems…

Animals achieve robust locomotion by offloading regulation from the brain to physical couplings within the body. In contrast, locomotion in artificial systems often depends on centralized processors. We introduce a rapid and autonomous…

Locomotion by shape changes (spermatozoon swimming, snake slithering, bird flapping) or gas expulsion (rocket firing) is assumed to require environmental interaction, due to conservation of momentum. As first noted in (Wisdom, 2003) and…

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 physics of behavior seeks simple descriptions of animal behavior. The field has advanced rapidly by using techniques in low dimensional dynamics distilled from computer vision. Yet, we still do not generally understand the rules which…

Rimless wheels are known as the simplest model for passive dynamic walking. It is known that the passive gait generated only by gravity effect always becomes asymptotically stable and 1-period because a rimless wheel automatically achieves…

We investigate the sensorimotor loop of simple robots simulated within the LPZRobots environment from the point of view of dynamical systems theory. For a robot with a cylindrical shaped body and an actuator controlled by a single…

Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…

This paper presents a Q-learning framework for learning optimal locomotion gaits in robotic systems modeled as coupled rigid bodies. Inspired by prevalence of periodic gaits in bio-locomotion, an open loop periodic input is assumed to (say)…

Foot slip is a major source of instability in bipedal locomotion on low-friction or uncertain terrain. Standard control approaches typically assume no-slip contact and therefore degrade when slip occurs. We propose a control framework that…

Natural and lifelike locomotion remains a fundamental challenge for humanoid robots to interact with human society. However, previous methods either neglect motion naturalness or rely on unstable and ambiguous style rewards. In this paper,…

Quadrupeds transition spontaneously to various gait patterns (e.g., walk, trot, pace, gallop) in response to the locomotion speed. The generation of these gait patterns has been the subject of debate for a long time. We propose a coupled…

Taking inspiration from the natural gait transition mechanism of quadrupeds, devising a good gait transition strategy is important for quadruped robots to achieve energy-efficient locomotion on various terrains and velocities. While…