8 accepted papers
Reinforcement learning (RL), while powerful and expressive, can often prioritize performance at the expense of safety. Yet safety violations can lead to catastrophic outcomes in real-world deployments. Control Barrier Functions (CBFs) offer a principled method to enforce dynamic safety—traditionally…
Robot learning has produced remarkably effective "black-box" controllers for complex tasks such as dynamic locomotion on humanoids. Yet ensuring dynamic safety, i.e., constraint satisfaction, remains challenging for such policies. Reinforcement learning (RL) embeds constraints heuristically through
We present a reinforcement learning (RL) framework that enables quadrupedal robots to perform soccer goalkeeping tasks in the real world. Soccer goalkeeping with quadrupeds is a challenging problem, that combines highly dynamic locomotion with precise and fast non-prehensile object (ball) manipulati…
Terrain-aware locomotion has become an emerging topic in legged robotics. However, it is hard to generate diverse, challenging, and realistic unstructured terrains in simulation, which limits the way researchers evaluate their locomotion policies. In this paper, we prototype the generation of a terr…
In this paper, we propose a multi-domain control parameter learning framework that combines Bayesian Optimization (BO) and Hybrid Zero Dynamics (HZD) for locomotion control of bipedal robots. We leverage BO to learn the control parameters used in the HZD-based controller. The learning process is fir…
This letter tackles the problem of robots collaboratively towing a load with cables to a specified goal location while avoiding collisions in real time. The introduction of cables (as opposed to rigid links) enables the robotic team to travel through narrow spaces by changing its intrinsic dimension
Recent years have seen a surge in commercially-available and affordable quadrupedal robots, with many of these platforms being actively used in research and industry. As the availability of legged robots grows, so does the need for controllers that enable these robots to perform useful skills. Howev…
An autonomous robot that is able to physically guide humans through narrow and cluttered spaces could be a big boon to the visually-impaired. Most prior robotic guiding systems are based on wheeled platforms with large bases with actuated rigid guiding canes. The large bases and the actuated arms li…