In recent years, legged robots locomotion has been transitioning from mostly flat ground in controlled settings to generic indoor and outdoor environments, approaching now real industrial scenarios. This paper aims at documenting some of the key progress made control that enabled this transition. Legged makes extensive use numerical trajectory optimization its online implementation, model predi...

Most animals exhibit significant neurological and morphological change throughout their lifetime. No robots to date, however, grow new morphological structure while behaving. This is due to technological limitations but also because it is unclear that morphological change provides a benefit to the acquisition of robust behavior in machines. Here I show that in evolving populations of simulated ...

In the landscape of intelligent systems and robotics, legged robots stand out as a fascinating fusion biological inspiration engineered design [...]

snake robots are hyper-redundant robots that are connected with one or two dof joints. they offer a number of potential advantages beyond the capabilities of most wheeled and legged robots. in this paper, kinematics and dynamics of a planar multi-link snake robot in worm-like locomotion on an inclined surface is investigated. in this locomotion, snake robot is able to move in the vertical plane...

The high probability of hardware failures prevents many advanced robots (e.g., legged robots) from being confidently deployed in real-world situations (e.g., post-disaster rescue). Instead of attempting to diagnose the failures, robots could adapt by trial-and-error in order to be able to complete their tasks. In that case, damage recovery can be seen as a Reinforcement Learning (RL) problem. H...

For many years, robotics has drawn inspiration from nature, but only recently has an understanding of the musculoskeletal dynamics of an animal running led to successful designs of small, selfstabilizing legged robots. Motivated by the question of how robots can take advantage of passive elastic elements, this work explores if considerable mechanical compliance contributes significantly to the ...

This paper presents a hybrid approach to learning and evolving of a team of Sony legged robots (AIBO) in the robot football domain. These advanced walking robots aim to participate in the Sony Legged Robot League within the RoboCup competition. To achieve this goal, three important issues have been addressed in the paper:(i) multi-sensor based distributed perception, (ii) behaviour based approa...

We present a new localization algorithm called Sensor Resetting Localization which is an extension of Monte Carlo Localization. The algorithm adds sensor based resampling to Monte Carlo Localization when the robot is lost. The new algorithm is robust to modelling errors including unmodelled movements and systematic errors. The algorithm can be used in real time on systems with limited computati...

A variety of conceptual models has been introduced to study legged locomotion. Such models offer unifying descriptions of task-level locomotion behaviors, and inform control design for legged robots. Our work focuses on models for quadrupedal running, with the objective to better understand the effect of torso compliance on gait stability and efficiency.