10 accepted papers
The biomimetic research of vertebrates is challenging in both mechanism design and control methods. Motivated by natural acrobatics exhibited by cats and humans, this paper presents a generic multi-joint continuous spinal system and a learning-based algorithm for agile and accurate control. The spin…
Achieving stable and natural locomotion in bipedal robots, comparable to that of humans and animals, remains a long-standing challenge in robotics. In this work, we propose a bio-inspired low-level control framework that streamlines the generation of naturalistic gait patterns while ensuring adaptab
This paper addresses the scarcity of affordable, fully-actuated five-fingered hands for dexterous teleoperation, which is crucial for collecting large-scale real-robot data within the "Learning from Demonstrations" paradigm. We introduce the prototype version of the RAPID Hand, the first low-cost, 2
Aerial manipulation provides an effective alternative to human labor in high-risk outdoor situations. Complex and variable environments demand the system to respond quickly with minimal latency to external disturbances. To address this challenge, we propose a learning-based variable whole-body model
This paper addresses the scarcity of low-cost but high-dexterity platforms for collecting real-world multi-fingered robot manipulation data towards generalist robot autonomy. To achieve it, we propose the RAPID Hand, a co-optimized hardware and software platform where the compact 20-DoF hand, robus…
Continuum robots, inspired by biological structures such as spines and tails, have attracted significant attention due to their flexibility and ability to perform complex tasks in confined and dynamic environments. However, traditional flexible continuum robots often encounter challenges such as non
Aerial manipulation has received increasing research interest with wide applications of drones. To perform specific tasks, robotic arms with various mechanical structures will be mounted on the drone. It results in sudden disturbances to the aerial manipulator when switching the robotic arm or inter…
As an active spine introduces more degree of freedoms (DOFs) as well as time-varying inertia, locomotion control of spined quadruped robots is challenging. Direct optimization on the full dynamics model causes prohibitive calculation time and is difficult to apply to embedded platforms. Model predic…
In this paper, we propose a novel grasp pipeline based on contact point detection on the truncated signed distance function (TSDF) volume to achieve closed-loop 7-degree-of-freedom (7-DoF) grasping on cluttered environments. The key aspects of our method are that 1) the proposed pipeline exploits th…
Control of an aerial manipulator is challenging due to the decentralized dynamics of the aerial vehicle and the robotic arm. It is generally complex to adjust the controller of the aerial manipulator when replacing a different robotic arm. This paper presents a flexible control scheme for a quadroto…