15 accepted papers
Humans possess a remarkable ability to react to unpredictable perturbations through immediate mechanical responses, which harness the visco-elastic properties of muscles to maintain balance. Inspired by this behavior, we propose a novel design of a robotic leg utilizing fibre jamming. The research h
Navigating natural environments with deformable terrain is a difficult challenge in robotics. Understanding the interaction dynamics between robots and such terrain is an important first step in enabling them to explore these environments. Terramechanics models are largely developed and tested on wh…
Autonomous robots are prone to fail in real world environments, where unknown factors can cause their world model to be inaccurate or incomplete. This causes robots to become stuck or repeatedly perform unsuccessful actions believing it is the best option. Static switching frameworks such as sequent…
There are many examples in nature of animals using acoustics to understand and navigate the world around them. Inspired by this, we train an image-to-image translation network to learn the mapping from recorded chirps and echos from an environment to a 360 <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math
Legged robots are popular candidates for missions in challenging terrains due to their versatile locomotion strategies. Terrain classification is a key enabling technology for autonomous legged robots, allowing them to harness their innate flexibility to adapt to the demands of their operating envir
This letter presents an autonomous navigation system for ground robots traversing aggressive unstructured terrain through a cohesive arrangement of mapping, deliberative planning and reactive behaviour modules. All systems are aware of terrain slope, visibility and vehicle orientation, enabling robo
Multi-legged robots are effective at traversing rough terrain. However, terrains that include collapsible footholds (i.e. regions that can collapse when stepped on) remain a significant challenge, especially since such situations can be extremely difficult to anticipate using only exteroceptive sens…
Legged robots have the ability to adapt their walking posture to navigate confined spaces due to their high degrees of freedom. However, this has not been exploited in most common multilegged platforms. This letter presents a deformable bounding box abstraction of the robot model, with accompanying
In this paper we present the design and control strategies of a novel quadruped climbing robot (named Magneto) with three degrees of freedom (3-DOF) actuated limbs and a 3-DOF compliant magnetic foot. By exploiting its high degrees of freedom, Magneto is able to deform its body shape to squeeze thro…
Evolutionary algorithms have previously shown promise in generating controllers for legged robots. Multiple evaluations across many evolutionary generations are typically required - simulators are frequently used to accommodate this. However, performance degradation is frequently observed when trans…
This work introduces a novel hybrid control architecture for a hexapod platform (Weaver), making it capable of autonomously navigating in uneven terrain. The main contribution stems from the use of vision-based exteroceptive terrain perception to adapt the robot's locomotion parameters. Avoiding com…
To address the goal of locomotion in very complex and difficult terrains, the authors are developing a new class of Ultralight Legged Robots. This paper presents the Multilegged Autonomous eXplorer (MAX), an ultralight, six-legged robot for traversal and exploration of challenging indoor and outdoor…
Legged robots offer a more versatile solution to traversing outdoor uneven terrain compared to their wheeled and tracked counterparts. They also provide a unique opportunity to perceive the terrain-robot interactions by listening to the sounds generated during locomotion. Legged robots such as hexap
Legged robots such as hexapods have the potential to traverse unstructured terrain. This paper introduces a novel hexapod robot (Weaver) using a hierarchical controller, with the ability to efficiently traverse uneven and inclined terrain. The robot has five joints per leg and 30 degrees of freedom…
Legged robots offer the potential of locomotion across various types of terrains. Different terrains require different gait patterns to enable greater traversal efficiency. Consequently, as a legged robot transitions from one type of terrain to another, the gait pattern should be adapted so as to ma…