8 accepted papers
Mobile robots of all shapes and sizes move through the air, water, and over ground. However, few robots can move through the ground. Not only are the forces resisting movement much greater than in air or water, but the interaction forces are more complicated. Here we propose a soft robotic device th…
The varied and complex dynamics of deformable terrain are significant impediments toward real-world viability of locomotive robotics, particularly for legged machines. We explore vertical jumping on granular media (GM) as a model task for legged locomotion on uncharacterized deformable terrain. By i…
Hybrid zero dynamics (HZD) has emerged as a popular framework for dynamic and underactuated bipedal walking, but has significant implementation difficulties when applied to the high degrees of freedom present in humanoid robots. The primary impediment is the process of gait design-it is difficult fo
Dynamic humanoid locomotion is a challenging control problem, and running is especially difficult to achieve, given the underactuation inherent to aerial domains. Previous work developed a gait-generating optimization framework for dynamic locomotion in the context of hybrid zero dynamics, producing…
This paper presents the methodology used to achieve efficient and dynamic walking behaviors on the prototype humanoid robotics platform, DURUS. As a means of providing a hardware platform capable of these behaviors, the design of DURUS combines highly efficient electromechanical components with “con
This work demonstrates fast motion planning for robot locomotion that is optimized for terrain with complex dynamics, specifically, rapid penetration of granular media. Gait planning is critical for many legged locomotion control approaches, but they typically assume rigid ground contact. We aim to…
Humanoid robots are designed with dozens of actuated joints to suit a variety of tasks, but walking controllers rarely make the best use of all of this freedom. We present a framework for maximizing the use of the full humanoid body for the purpose of stable dynamic locomotion, which requires no res
Hybrid zero dynamics (HZD) has emerged as a popular framework for the stable control of bipedal robotic gaits, but typically designing a gait's virtual constraints is a slow and undependable optimization process. To expedite and boost the reliability of HZD gait generation, we borrow methods from tr…