Recent successes of missions such as the MSL and the Rosetta have increased the interest in the robotic exploration of other planets and asteroids. Although most of these missions envisage the use of rovers, legged robots have shown the potential to outperform wheeled vehicles on rough terrains in terms of speed and energy efficiency. In this paper, the x-MP controller presented in recent work,...

Existing legged robots lack energy-efficiency, performance and adaptivity when confronted with situations that animals cope with on a routine basis. Bridging the gap between artificial and natural systems requires not only better sensorimotor and learning capabilities but also a corresponding motion apparatus and intelligent actuators. Current actuators with online adaptable compliance pose hig...

This paper proposes a novel method of applying feedback control for legged robots, by directly modifying parameters of a robot’s gait pattern. Gaits are a popular means of producing stable locomotion for legged robots, through the use of cyclic feedforward motion patterns, while requiring little to no sensory information. We are interested in incorporating feedback with these systems, and make ...

R ABBIT is a bipedal robot specifically designed to advance the fundamental understanding of controlled legged locomotion. The motivation for studying walking robots arises from diverse sociological and commercial interests, ranging from the desire to replace humans in hazardous occupations (demining, nuclear power plant inspection, military interventions, etc.) to the restoration of motion in ...

Articulated robots such as legged robots hold the promise to lead to versatile, multi purpose machines that eventually become useful in many application scenarios such as construction sites, disaster recovery, service robotics and remote inspection. For these tasks a great deal of kinematic flexibility and dexterity is required. As the inspiring examples in biology show, arms and legs are usefu...

Contact-based decision and planning methods are increasingly being sought for task execution in humanoid robots. Formal methods for verification and synthesis have not been yet incorporated into the motion planning sequence to generate complex mobility behaviors in legged humanoid robots. This study takes a step toward formally synthesizing a high-level reactive task planner for unified legged ...

Palm sized legged robots show promise for military and civilian applications, including exploration of hazardous or difficult to reach places, search and rescue, espionage, and battlefield reconnaissance. However, they also face many technical obstacles, includingbut not limited toactuator performance, weight constraints, processing power, and power density. This paper presents an overview of s...

Legged robots allow the locomotion on terrains inaccessible to other type of vehicles because they do not need a continuous support surface. Different strategies have been adopted for the optimization of these systems, during their design and construction phases, and during their operation. Among the different optimization criteria followed by different authors, it is possible to find issues re...

Birds, sh, and many other animals travel as a ock, school, or herd. Animals in these groups must remain in close proximity while avoiding collisions with neighbors and with obstacles. We would like to reproduce this behavior for groups of arti cial creatures with signi cant dynamics. In this paper we describe an algorithm for creatures that move as a group and evaluate the performance of the al...

Bio-inspired legged robots have demonstrated the capability to walk and run across a wide variety of terrains, such as those found after a natural disaster. However, the survival of victims of natural disasters depends on the speed at which these robots can travel. This paper describes the need for adaptive gait tuning on an eight-legged robot, which will enable it to adjust its gait parameters...