8 accepted papers
This paper presents a system for enabling real-time synthesis of whole-body locomotion and manipulation policies for real-world legged robots. Motivated by recent advancements in robot simulation, we leverage the efficient parallelization capabilities of the MuJoCo simulator on a multi-core CPU to a
We present a model-predictive control (MPC) framework for legged robots that avoids the singularities associated with common three-parameter attitude representations like Euler angles during large-angle rotations. Our method parameterizes the robot's attitude with singularity-free unit quaternions a
In this work, we introduce a framework that enables highly maneuverable locomotion using non-periodic contacts. This task is challenging for traditional optimization and planning methods to handle due to difficulties in specifying contact mode sequences in real-time. To address this, we use a bi-lev
We present ReLU-QP, a GPU-accelerated solver for quadratic programs (QPs) that is capable of solving high-dimensional control problems at real-time rates. ReLU-QP is derived by exactly reformulating the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) algorithm for solving QPs as a deep, weight-ti…
Given monocular videos, we build 3D models of articulated objects and environments whose 3D configurations satisfy dynamics and contact constraints. At its core, our method leverages differentiable physics simulation to aid visual reconstructions. We couple differentiable physics simulation with dif…
We present SLoMo: a first-of-its-kind framework for transferring skilled motions from casually captured “in-the-wild” video footage of humans and animals to legged robots. SLoMo works in three stages: 1) synthesize a physically plausible reconstructed key-point trajectory from monocular videos; 2) o
Aquatic locomotion is a classic fluid-structure interaction (FSI) problem of interest to biologists and engineers. Solving the fully coupled FSI equations for incompressible Navier-Stokes and finite elasticity is computationally expensive. Optimizing robotic swimmer design within such a system gener…
Accurate simulation of soft mechanisms under dynamic actuation is critical for the design of soft robots. We address this gap with our differentiable simulation tool by learning the material parameters of our soft robotic fish. On the example of a soft robotic fish, we demonstrate an experimentally-…