Related papers: Natural Locomotion: Principle and Method
Humans excel at robust bipedal walking in complex natural environments. In each step, they adequately tune the interaction of biomechanical muscle dynamics and neuronal signals to be robust against uncertainties in ground conditions.…
This paper presents a soft earthworm robot that is capable of both efficient locomotion and obstacle avoidance. The robot is designed to replicate the unique locomotion mechanisms of earthworms, which enable them to move through narrow and…
A general, variational approach to derive low-order reduced systems for nonlinear systems subject to an autonomous forcing, is introduced. The approach is based on the concept of optimal parameterizing manifold (PM) that substitutes the…
We study the asymptotic behaviour of a family of dynamic models of crawling locomotion, with the aim of characterizing a gait as a limit property. The locomotors, which might have a discrete or continuous body, move on a line with a…
This paper presents an admittance controller based on the passivity theory for a powered upper-limb exoskeleton robot which is governed by the nonlinear equation of motion. Passivity allows us to include a human operator and environmental…
Despite contending with constraints imposed by the environment, morphology, and physiology, animals move well by physically interactingwith the environment to use and transition between modes such as running, climbing, and self-righting. By…
Template models are frequently used to simplify the control dynamics for robot hopping or running. Passive limit cycles can emerge for such systems and be exploited for energy-efficient control. A grand challenge in locomotion is trunk…
Passive tumbling uses natural forces like gravity for efficient travel. But without an active means of control, passive tumblers must rely entirely on external forces. Northeastern University's COBRA is a snake robot that can morph into a…
Voxel-based structures provide a modular, mechanically flexible periodic lattice which can be used as a soft robot through internal deformations. To engage these structures for robotic tasks, we use a finite element method to characterize…
It is well known that conservative mechanical systems exhibit local oscillatory behaviours due to their elastic and gravitational potentials, which completely characterise these periodic motions together with the inertial properties of the…
Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…
Humanoid robots are made to resemble humans but their locomotion abilities are far from ours in terms of agility and versatility. When humans walk on complex terrains, or face external disturbances, they combine a set of strategies,…
We focus on the problem of developing energy efficient controllers for quadrupedal robots. Animals can actively switch gaits at different speeds to lower their energy consumption. In this paper, we devise a hierarchical learning framework,…
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…
A nonlinear dynamical system is called eventually competitive (or cooperative) provided that it preserves a partial order in backward (or forward) time only after some reasonable initial transient. We presented in this paper the…
Due to brain-body co-evolution, animals' intrinsic body dynamics play a crucial role in energy-efficient locomotion, which shares control effort between active muscles and passive body dynamics -- a principle known as Embodied Physical…
In search of a simple baseline for Deep Reinforcement Learning in locomotion tasks, we propose a model-free open-loop strategy. By leveraging prior knowledge and the elegance of simple oscillators to generate periodic joint motions, it…
Worm-inspired robots provide an effective locomotion strategy for constrained environments by combining cyclic body deformation with alternating anchoring. For compliant robots, however, the interaction between deformable anchoring…
In this paper, we describe an approach to achieve dynamic legged locomotion on physical robots which combines existing methods for control with reinforcement learning. Specifically, our goal is a control hierarchy in which highest-level…
A nonholonomic system is a mechanical system with velocity constraints not originating from position constraints; rolling without slipping is the typical example. A nonholonomic integrator is a numerical method specifically designed for…