This paper describes three projects that are concerned with the exploration of the interior of steep craters, with special focus on exploring lunar craters with heterogeneous robotic teams. Within the project LUNARES (Lunar Exploration System), a terrestrial demonstrator for a lunar sample return mission has been created. The task of fetching a soil sample from within a permanently shadowed lun...

This paper develops a framework for the realistic autonomous animation and motion control of four-legged animals. Our system uses a combination of kinematics, dynamics and control theory. The input to our system, the velocity and heading of the animal, originates either from a simulated visual sensory system or a user. Based on this input we model walking, trotting, and simple behaviors such as...

Ability to translate to a goal position under the constrains imposed by complex environmental conditions is a key capability for biological and artificial systems alike. Over billions of years evolutionary processes have developed a wide range of solutions to address mobility needs in air, in water and on land. The efficacy of such biological locomotors is beyond the capabilities of engineering...

Biology has always been a source of inspiration and ideas for the robotics community. Legged locomotion problem is not an exception, and many experiences have taken ideas from animals, both for morphological and behavioral issues. The first ideas for gait generation came from animal observation, but they were mainly focused on mimicking legs movements. It was not until the nineties that the fir...

This paper describes how the SGOCE paradigm has been used within the context of a "minimal simula-tion" strategy to evolve neural networks controlling locomotion and obstacle-avoidance in a 6-legged robot. Such controllers have been rst evolved through simulation and then successfully downloaded on the real robot.

Locomotion and manipulation are two essential skills in robotics but often divided or decoupled into separate problems. It is widely accepted that the topological duality between multi-legged locomotion multi-fingered shares an intrinsic model. However, a lack of research remains to identify data-driven evidence for further research. This paper explores unified formulation loco-manipulation pro...

The gait transition during locomotion in legged animals is an attractive phenomenon from the point of view of both robotics and biology. In this paper we will show by means of a mathematical model that the optimal gait pattern is selected according to energetic e ciency, including the energy loss due to the heat emissions of actuators.

This paper describes how the SGOCE paradigm has been used within the context of a minimal simula tion strategy to evolve neural networks controlling locomotion and obstacle avoidance in a legged robot Such controllers have been rst evolved through sim ulation and then successfully downloaded on the real robot

Abstract Legged robots have potential advantages in mobility compared with wheeled outdoor environments. The knowledge of various ground properties and adaptive locomotion based on different surface materials plays an important role improving the stability legged robots. A terrain classification method for a hexapod robot named Qingzhui is proposed this paper. First, force-based suggested. Grou...

Legged locomotion is widespread in nature and has inspired the design of current robots. The controller these legged robots often realized as one centralized instance. However, nature, control movement happens a hierarchical decentralized fashion. Introducing biological principles into robotic systems motivated this work. We tackle question whether beneficial for present novel decentral, archit...