Legged Locomotion

How can we get robots to move through the world?

Wheels are great for moving over flat surfances, but if you want to go almost anywhere on land, it’s hard to beat legs.

My dog, Audie, exhibiting excellent legged locomotion capabilities over shifting and uneven terrain.

Legged robots could enable new transportation methods, assist in disaster response, and help restore mobility to people who have lost it.

Just like manipulation, people and animals are so good at legged locomotion that we often underestimate how difficult it is. Despite recent a surge of progress in legged robotics, numerous thorny questions remain. How can a legged robot use its whole body – not just the feet – to move through the world? What sort of models do we need to achieve animal-level performance? What are the underlying principles behind legged locomotion in nature, and what do those look like when applied to robots?

Related Publications

2023

  1. dual_jaco.png
    Inverse Dynamics Trajectory Optimization for Contact-Implicit Model Predictive Control
    Vince Kurtz, Alejandro Castro, Aykut Özgün Önol , and 1 more author
    arXiv preprint, 2023

2022

  1. contact_surface_composite.png
    Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization with Hydroelastic Contact and iLQR
    Vince Kurtz, and Hai Lin
    In International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) , 2022
  2. standing_with_boots.png
    Mini Cheetah, the Falling Cat: A Case Study in Machine Learning and Trajectory Optimization for Robot Acrobatics
    Vince Kurtz, He Li, Patrick M. Wensing , and 1 more author
    In International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) , 2022
  3. triple_pendulum.png
    Learning to Control Robot Hopping over Uneven Terrain
    Michael Lemmon, Patrick M. Wensing, Vince Kurtz , and 1 more author
    In American Control Conference (ACC) , 2022

2020

  1. push_screenshot.png
    Approximate Simulation for Template-Based Whole-Body Control
    Vince Kurtz, Patrick M. Wensing, and Hai Lin
    IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (RA-L), 2020

2019

  1. lipm.png
    Formal Connections between Template and Anchor Models via Approximate Simulation
    Vince Kurtz, Rafael Rodrigues Silva, Patrick M. Wensing , and 1 more author
    In International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids) , 2019
    Best interactive paper award