28 accepted papers
We introduce PAPRLE (Plug-And-Play Robotic Limb Environment), a modular ecosystem that enables flexible placement and control of robotic limbs. With PAPRLE, a user can re-configure the arrangement of the robotic limbs, and control them with various kinds of devices, including puppeteers, handheld co…
Integrating multiple locomotion modes on a single platform has become an active focus in pursuit of versatile and efficient movement. This paper introduces a novel monocycle robot with four legs, named Ringbot Quad, combining the wheeled and legged mechanisms. The Ringbot Quad is developed as a uniq…
The Mobile Object Manipulation Operator (MOMO) is an innovative and reconfigurable robotic system that transforms traditional serving robots into mobile manipulators. Leveraging the form factor and mobility of serving robots, MOMO integrates up to three pluggable devices, including 6-DoF manipulator…
Direct physical guidance is a natural means of teaching and interacting with robots, and robotic skins make a key contribution by enabling sensitive contact sensing and localization. This paper presents a tactile–proprioceptive sensor fusion framework for rev{natural physical human-robot interaction…
Humanoid robots are increasingly being developed for seamless interaction with humans in diverse domains, yet generating expressive and physically-feasible motions remains a core challenge. We propose a robust and automated pipeline for motion retargeting that enables the generation of natural, stab
Soft tactile sensors can enable robots to grasp objects easily and stably by simultaneously providing tactile data and mechanical compliance to robotic hands. If there are low-cost and easy-to-build robotic hands equipped with soft tactile sensors, they would be highly accessible and facilitate many…
Indoor parking lots are the GPS-denied spaces to which vision-based localization approaches have usually been applied to solve localization problems. However, due to the repetitiveness and symmetry of the spaces, visual localization methods commonly confront difficulties in estimating precise 3D pos…
In this paper, we propose a lip-inspired passive jamming gripper by mimicking teeth structures from a dog's oral structure. Animal lips are hydrostatic structures. To mimic the features, which are usually soft but rigid when contacted, we used the passive particle jamming effect. To increase the ada…
Bat flight has been an underdeveloped area of bio-inspired robotics because of the vast complexities of biological bat flight and the over 40 degrees of freedom present in their bodies. The robotic flapping system Bat Bot (B2) has been shown to exhibit fundamental properties of biological bat flight…
Indoor visual localization is significant for various applications such as autonomous robots, augmented reality, and mixed reality. Recent advances in visual localization have demonstrated their feasibility in large-scale indoor spaces through coarse-to-fine methods that typically employ three steps…
In this paper, we present self-supervised shared latent embedding (S3LE), a data-driven motion retargeting method that enables the generation of natural motions in humanoid robots from motion capture data or RGB videos. While it requires paired data consisting of human poses and their corresponding…
Underactuated robots often require involved routines for trajectory planning due to their complex dynamics. Flapping-wing aerial vehicles have unsteady aerodynamics and periodic gaits that complicate the planning procedure. In this paper, we improve upon existing methods for flight planning by intro…
This letter presents a data-driven motion retargeting method with safety considerations. In particular, we focus on handling self-collisions while transferring poses between different domains. To this end, we first propose leveraged Wasserstein auto-encoders (LWAE) which leverage both positive and n
In this work, we present a semi-supervised learning method to transfer human motion data to humanoid robots with varying kinematic configurations while avoiding self-collisions.To this end, we propose a data-driven motion retargeting named locally weighted latent learning which possesses the benefi…
This paper describes the development of a system for lifelike gaze in human-robot interactions using a humanoid Audio-Animatronics® bust. Previous work examining mutual gaze between robots and humans has focused on technical implementation. We present a general architecture that seeks not only to cr…
In this paper, we present the second version of a reconfigurable modular legged robot, Snapbot V2. The mechanical design of Snapbot V2 is enhanced for better dynamic performance and robust connection with modular legs. A motion generator for locomotion is developed to achieve various locomotion skil…
This paper proposes a realistic indoor modeling framework for large-scale indoor spaces. The proposed framework reduces the geometric complexity of an indoor model to efficiently represent large-scale environments for image-based rendering (IBR) approaches. For this purpose, the proposed framework r…
Imitation of the upper body motions of human demonstrators or animation characters to human-shaped robots is studied in this paper. We present a pipeline for motion retargeting by transferring the joints of interest (JOI) of source motions to the target humanoid robot. To this end, we deploy an opti…
In this paper, we propose a trajectory-based reinforcement learning method named deep latent policy gradient (DLPG) for learning locomotion skills. We define the policy function as a probability distribution over trajectories and train the policy using a deep latent variable model to achieve sample…
In this paper, we present the design and performance evaluation of a bipedal robot that utilizes the Hybrid Leg mechanism. It is a leg mechanism that achieves 6 DOF with a combined structure of serial and parallel mechanism. It is designed to have a light structural inertia and large workspace for a…
This paper presents a 6 DOF leg mechanism for a humanoid robot. The proposed Hybrid Leg is designed to combine serial and parallel mechanisms and consists of a pair of twin 3 DOF serial chains in parallel. A 5-bar-linkage mechanism is implemented to the serial mechanism to generate 2 DOF motion rega…
We present a novel computational approach to optimizing the morphological design of robotic devices. Our framework takes as input a parameterized robot design, and a motion plan consisting of end-effector trajectories and/or a body trajectory. The algorithm we propose is used to optimize a set of de…
We develop a reconfigurable legged robot, named Snapbot, to emulate configuration changes and various styles of legged locomotion. The body of Snapbot houses a microcontroller and a battery for untethered operation. The body also contains connections for communication and power to the modular legs.…
Among legged robots, hopping and running robots are useful because they can traverse terrain at high speeds and are a benchmark platform for locomotion actuators; if an actuator can power a hopping robot, it can power a walking robot. We aim to create a hopping mechanism for a small-scale, one-legge
To enable robust dynamic walking on the Atlas robot, we extend our previous work by adding a receding-horizon component. The new controller consists of three hierarchies: a center of mass (CoM) trajectory planner that follows a sequence of desired foot steps, a receding-horizon controller that optim…
The design of legged robots is often inspired by animals evolved to excel at different tasks. However, while mimicking morphological features seen in nature can be very powerful, robots may need to perform motor tasks that their living counterparts do not. In the absence of designs that can be mimic…
The purpose of this research is the development of a soft skin module with a built-in airtight cavity in which air pressure can be sensed. A pressure feedback controller is implemented on a robotic system using this module for contact sensing and gentle grasping. The soft skin module is designed to…
Our goal is to bring animation characters to life in the real world. We present a bipedal robot that looks like and walks like an animation character. We start from animation data of a character walking. We develop a bipedal robot which corresponds to lower part of the character following its kinema…