In a world designed for legs, quadrupeds, bipeds, and humanoids have the opportunity to
impact emerging robotics applications from logistics, to agriculture, to home assistance. The …

We present a single trajectory optimization formulation for legged locomotion that
automatically determines the gait sequence, step timings, footholds, swing-leg motions, and …

This article discusses the control design and experiment validation of a flexible two-link
manipulator (FTLM) system represented by ordinary differential equations (ODEs). A …

Walking is the most common terrestrial form of locomotion in animals. Its great versatility and
flexibility has led to many attempts at building walking machines with similar capabilities …

Direct methods for trajectory optimization are widely used for planning locally optimal
trajectories of robotic systems. Many critical tasks, such as locomotion and manipulation …

Model predictive control (MPC) of legged and humanoid robotic systems has been an active
research topic in the past decade. While MPC for robotic systems has a long history, its …

The purpose of this paper is to present inverse optimal control as a promising approach to
transfer biological motions to robots. Inverse optimal control helps (a) to understand and …

Rigid body dynamics is a well-established frame--work in robotics. It can be used to expose
the analytic form of kinematic and dynamic functions of the robot model. So far, two major …

We present a technique for automatically synthesizing walking and running controllers for
physically-simulated 3D humanoid characters. The sagittal hip, knee, and ankle degrees-of …

Contact constraints, such as those between a foot and the ground or a hand and an object,
are inherent in many robotic tasks. These constraints define a manifold of feasible states; …