14 accepted papers
Robust state estimation for highly dynamic motion of legged robots remains challenging, especially in dynamic, contact-rich scenarios. Traditional approaches often rely on binary contact states that fail to capture the nuances of partial contact or directional slippage. This paper presents CoCo-InEK…
Animated characters often move in non-physical ways and have proportions that are far from a typical walking robot. This provides an ideal platform for innovation in both mechanical design and stylized motion control. In this letter, we bring Olaf to life in the physical world, relying on reinforcem
Despite recent advances in robust locomotion, bipedal robots operating in the real world remain at risk of falling. While most research focuses on preventing such events, we instead concentrate on the phenomenon of falling itself. Specifically, we aim to reduce physical damage to the robot while pro…
Teleoperated robotic characters can perform expressive interactions with humans, relying on the operators’ experience and social intuition. In this work, we propose to create autonomous interactive robots, by training a model to imitate operator data. Our model is trained on a dataset of human-robot
Legged robots have achieved impressive feats in dynamic locomotion in challenging unstructured terrain. However, in entertainment applications, the design and control of these robots face additional challenges in appealing to human audiences. This work aims to unify expressive, artist-directed motio…
Robot mechanisms that exploit compliance can perform complex tasks under uncertainty using simple control strategies, but it remains difficult to design mechanisms with a desired embodied intelligence. In this article, we propose an automated design technique that optimizes the desired load-displace
Simulation representations of robots have advanced in recent years. Yet, there remain significant sim-to-real gaps because of modeling assumptions and hard-to-model behaviors such as friction. In this letter, we propose to augment common simulation representations with a transformer-inspired archite
Robots with kinematic loops are known to have superior mechanical performance. However, due to these loops, their modeling and control is challenging, and prevents a more widespread use. In this letter, we describe a versatile Inverse Kinematics (IK) formulation for the retargeting of expressive mot
We introduce a singularity-aware design optimization method for spatial multi-degree-of-freedom mechanical linkages. At the core of our approach is an adversarial sampling strategy, which actively detects singular configurations within the targeted operation range. The detection of singularities in
Simulation-driven design of soft robots requires accurate and stable simulations. In this article, we present an inverse finite element approach enabling simulation-ready characterization of soft robotic materials from uniaxial test data. Representing test specimens with finite elements, and modelin
We present a system for fast and robust handovers with a robot character, together with a user study investigating the effect of robot speed and reaction time on perceived interaction quality. The system can match and exceed human speeds and confirms that users prefer human-level timing. The system…
In this letter, we investigate the role of haptic feedback in human-robot handshaking by comparing different force controllers. The basic hypothesis is that in human handshaking force control there is a balance between an intrinsic (open-loop) and extrinsic (closed-loop) contributions. We use an und
Handshakes are common greetings, and humans therefore have strong priors of what a handshake should feel like. This makes it challenging to create compelling and realistic human-robot handshakes, necessitating the consideration of human haptic perception in the design of robot hands. At its most bas…
We present variable amplitude module orthogonal slider (VAMOS), a novel two-motor hexapedal robot that is able to walk and turn with arbitrary curvature. The VAMOS walking mechanism is based around a variable amplitude module (VAM), a compact and modular gearbox that produces reciprocating sinusoida