Publications (235)
Whole-Body Nonlinear Model Predictive Control Through Contacts for Quadrupeds
Michael Neunert, Markus Stäuble, Markus Giftthaler +5
In this work we present a whole-body Nonlinear Model Predictive Control approach for Rigid Body Systems subject to contacts. We use a full dynamic system model which also includes…
Pretraining in Actor-Critic Reinforcement Learning for Locomotion
Jiale Fan, Andrei Cramariuc, Tifanny Portela +1
The paper proposes a pretraining approach that learns a proprioceptive inverse dynamics model from task‑agnostic exploration data and uses its weights to warm‑start actor‑critic re…
Spatially-Enhanced Recurrent Memory for Long-Range Mapless Navigation via End-to-End Reinforcement Learning
Fan Yang, Per Frivik, David Hoeller +3
Recent advancements in robot navigation, particularly with end-to-end learning approaches such as reinforcement learning (RL), have demonstrated strong performance. However, succes…
Efficient Learning-Based Control of a Legged Robot in Lunar Gravity
Philip Arm, Oliver Fischer, Joseph Church +3
Legged robots are promising candidates for exploring challenging areas on low-gravity bodies such as the Moon, Mars, or asteroids, thanks to their advanced mobility on unstructured…
Obstacle-Avoidant Leader Following with a Quadruped Robot
Carmen Scheidemann, Lennart Werner, Victor Reijgwart +5
Personal mobile robotic assistants are expected to find wide applications in industry and healthcare. For example, people with limited mobility can benefit from robots helping with…
Resilient Legged Local Navigation: Learning to Traverse with Compromised Perception End-to-End
Jin Jin, Chong Zhang, Jonas Frey +4
Autonomous robots must navigate reliably in unknown environments even under compromised exteroceptive perception, or perception failures. Such failures often occur when harsh envir…
Deep Value Model Predictive Control
Farbod Farshidian, David Hoeller, Marco Hutter
In this paper, we introduce an actor-critic algorithm called Deep Value Model Predictive Control (DMPC), which combines model-based trajectory optimization with value function esti…
DiffSim2Real: Deploying Quadrupedal Locomotion Policies Purely Trained in Differentiable Simulation
Joshua Bagajo, Clemens Schwarke, Victor Klemm +5
Differentiable simulators provide analytic gradients, enabling more sample-efficient learning algorithms and paving the way for data intensive learning tasks such as learning from…
WildOS: Open-Vocabulary Object Search in the Wild
Hardik Shah, Erica Tevere, Deegan Atha +6
Autonomous navigation in complex, unstructured outdoor environments requires robots to operate over long ranges without prior maps and limited depth sensing. In such settings, rely…
Multi-Layered Safety for Legged Robots via Control Barrier Functions and Model Predictive Control
Ruben Grandia, Andrew J. Taylor, Aaron D. Ames +1
The problem of dynamic locomotion over rough terrain requires both accurate foot placement together with an emphasis on dynamic stability. Existing approaches to this problem prior…
Dynamic object goal pushing with mobile manipulators through model-free constrained reinforcement learning
Ioannis Dadiotis, Mayank Mittal, Nikos Tsagarakis +1
Non-prehensile pushing to move and reorient objects to a goal is a versatile loco-manipulation skill. In the real world, the object's physical properties and friction with the floo…
Diffusion Based Robust LiDAR Place Recognition
Benjamin Krummenacher, Jonas Frey, Turcan Tuna +2
Mobile robots on construction sites require accurate pose estimation to perform autonomous surveying and inspection missions. Localization in construction sites is a particularly c…
Towards bridging the gap: Systematic sim-to-real transfer for diverse legged robots
Filip Bjelonic, Fabian Tischhauser, Marco Hutter
Legged robots must achieve both robust locomotion and energy efficiency to be practical in real-world environments. Yet controllers trained in simulation often fail to transfer rel…
Learning Locomotion on Discrete Terrain via Minimal Proximity Sensing
Jiale Fan, Connor Flynn, Tianao Xu +4
Learning-based control has revolutionized dynamic locomotion, yet navigating unstructured terrain remains limited by a robot's incomplete awareness of imminent ground contact. Whil…
Robotic World Model: A Neural Network Simulator for Robust Policy Optimization in Robotics
Chenhao Li, Andreas Krause, Marco Hutter
Learning robust and generalizable world models is crucial for enabling efficient and scalable robotic control in real-world environments. In this work, we introduce a novel framewo…
Vernata: Self-Supervised Learning of LiDAR Point Representations
Oliver Lemke, Alexander Liniger, Abel Gawel +1
LiDAR serves as a primary sensing modality for robots operating in outdoor environments. However, the performance of deep learning models in this domain is severely limited by the…
Rolling in the Deep -- Hybrid Locomotion for Wheeled-Legged Robots using Online Trajectory Optimization
Marko Bjelonic, Prajish K. Sankar, C. Dario Bellicoso +2
Wheeled-legged robots have the potential for highly agile and versatile locomotion. The combination of legs and wheels might be a solution for any real-world application requiring…
DeFM: Learning Foundation Representations from Depth for Robotics
Manthan Patel, Jonas Frey, Mayank Mittal +5
Depth sensors are widely deployed across robotic platforms, and advances in fast, high-fidelity depth simulation have enabled robotic policies trained on depth observations to achi…
SE(2) Navigation Mesh
Shuyang Shi, Kaixian Qu, Changan Chen +3
Global navigation for ground robots in complex multi-level environments requires representations that accurately capture traversable regions while enabling efficient path planning.…
Less Is More: Scalable Visual Navigation from Limited Data
Yves Inglin, Jonas Frey, Changan Chen +1
Imitation learning provides a powerful framework for goal-conditioned visual navigation in mobile robots, enabling obstacle avoidance while respecting human preferences and social…
A Framework for Collaborative Multi-Robot Mapping using Spectral Graph Wavelets
Lukas Bernreiter, Shehryar Khattak, Lionel Ott +3
The exploration of large-scale unknown environments can benefit from the deployment of multiple robots for collaborative mapping. Each robot explores a section of the environment a…
Multi-Domain Motion Embedding: Expressive Real-Time Mimicry for Legged Robots
Matthias Heyrman, Chenhao Li, Victor Klemm +3
Effective motion representation is crucial for enabling robots to imitate expressive behaviors in real time, yet existing motion controllers often ignore inherent patterns in motio…
GraspQP: Differentiable Optimization of Force Closure for Diverse and Robust Dexterous Grasping
René Zurbrügg, Andrei Cramariuc, Marco Hutter
Dexterous robotic hands enable versatile interactions due to the flexibility and adaptability of multi-fingered designs, allowing for a wide range of task-specific grasp configurat…
Combining Learning-based Locomotion Policy with Model-based Manipulation for Legged Mobile Manipulators
Yuntao Ma, Farbod Farshidian, Takahiro Miki +2
Deep reinforcement learning produces robust locomotion policies for legged robots over challenging terrains. To date, few studies have leveraged model-based methods to combine thes…
Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments
Mayank Mittal, Calvin Yu, Qinxi Yu +12
We present Orbit, a unified and modular framework for robot learning powered by NVIDIA Isaac Sim. It offers a modular design to easily and efficiently create robotic environments w…
DigiForest: Digital Analytics and Robotics for Sustainable Forestry
Marco Camurri, Enrico Tomelleri, MatÃas Mattamala +18
Covering one third of Earth's land surface, forests are vital to global biodiversity, climate regulation, and human well-being. In Europe, forests and woodlands reach approximately…
Learning robust perceptive locomotion for quadrupedal robots in the wild
Takahiro Miki, Joonho Lee, Jemin Hwangbo +3
Legged robots that can operate autonomously in remote and hazardous environments will greatly increase opportunities for exploration into under-explored areas. Exteroceptive percep…
Learning to Open and Traverse Doors with a Legged Manipulator
Mike Zhang, Yuntao Ma, Takahiro Miki +1
Using doors is a longstanding challenge in robotics and is of significant practical interest in giving robots greater access to human-centric spaces. The task is challenging due to…
Constraint Handling in Continuous-Time DDP-Based Model Predictive Control
Jean-Pierre Sleiman, Farbod Farshidian, Marco Hutter
The Sequential Linear Quadratic (SLQ) algorithm is a continuous-time variant of the well-known Differential Dynamic Programming (DDP) technique with a Gauss-Newton Hessian approxim…
Haptic Teleoperation of High-dimensional Robotic Systems Using a Feedback MPC Framework
Jin Cheng, Firas Abi-Farraj, Farbod Farshidian +1
Model Predictive Control (MPC) schemes have proven their efficiency in controlling high degree-of-freedom (DoF) complex robotic systems. However, they come at a high computational…
FunFact: Building Probabilistic Functional 3D Scene Graphs via Factor-Graph Reasoning
Zhengyu Fu, René Zurbrügg, Kaixian Qu +4
Recent work in 3D scene understanding is moving beyond purely spatial analysis toward functional scene understanding. However, existing methods often consider functional relationsh…
Pedipulate: Enabling Manipulation Skills using a Quadruped Robot's Leg
Philip Arm, Mayank Mittal, Hendrik Kolvenbach +1
Legged robots have the potential to become vital in maintenance, home support, and exploration scenarios. In order to interact with and manipulate their environments, most legged r…
Adaptive CLF-MPC With Application To Quadrupedal Robots
Maria Vittoria Minniti, Ruben Grandia, Farbod Farshidian +1
Modern robotic systems are endowed with superior mobility and mechanical skills that make them suited to be employed in real-world scenarios, where interactions with heavy objects…
Control of a Quadrotor with Reinforcement Learning
Jemin Hwangbo, Inkyu Sa, Roland Siegwart +1
In this paper, we present a method to control a quadrotor with a neural network trained using reinforcement learning techniques. With reinforcement learning, a common network can b…
ArtiTwinSplat: Interactable Digital Twin Reconstruction via Gaussian Splatting from RGB-D videos
Pranjal Mishra, René Zurbrügg, Max Wilder-Smith +4
Deploying robots in unstructured real-world environments needs accurate, interactive models of the objects. Constructing these models at scale remains a critical bottleneck for rob…
Learning Multi-Agent Local Collision-Avoidance for Collaborative Carrying tasks with Coupled Quadrupedal Robots
Francesca Bray, Simone Tolomei, Andrei Cramariuc +2
Robotic collaborative carrying could greatly benefit human activities like warehouse and construction site management. However, coordinating the simultaneous motion of multiple rob…
Learning Quadrupedal Locomotion over Challenging Terrain
Joonho Lee, Jemin Hwangbo, Lorenz Wellhausen +2
Some of the most challenging environments on our planet are accessible to quadrupedal animals but remain out of reach for autonomous machines. Legged locomotion can dramatically ex…
Present and Future of SLAM in Extreme Underground Environments
Kamak Ebadi, Lukas Bernreiter, Harel Biggie +28
This paper reports on the state of the art in underground SLAM by discussing different SLAM strategies and results across six teams that participated in the three-year-long SubT co…
Large Scale Robotic Material Handling: Learning, Planning, and Control
Filippo A. Spinelli, Yifan Zhai, Fang Nan +6
Bulk material handling involves the efficient and precise moving of large quantities of materials, a core operation in many industries, including cargo ship unloading, waste sortin…
MultiViPerFrOG: A Globally Optimized Multi-Viewpoint Perception Framework for Camera Motion and Tissue Deformation
Guido Caccianiga, Julian Nubert, Cesar Cadena +2
Reconstructing the 3D shape of a deformable environment from the information captured by a moving depth camera is highly relevant to surgery. The underlying challenge is the fact t…
Residual Policy Learning for Perceptive Quadruped Control Using Differentiable Simulation
Jing Yuan Luo, Yunlong Song, Victor Klemm +3
First-order Policy Gradient (FoPG) algorithms such as Backpropagation through Time and Analytical Policy Gradients leverage local simulation physics to accelerate policy search, si…
Towards Autonomous Robotic Precision Harvesting: Mapping, Localization, Planning and Control for a Legged Tree Harvester
Edo Jelavic, Dominic Jud, Pascal Egli +1
This paper presents an integrated system for performing precision harvesting missions using a legged harvester. Our harvester performs a challenging task of autonomous navigation a…
Passivity-based control for haptic teleoperation of a legged manipulator in presence of time-delays
Mattia Risiglione, Jean-Pierre Sleiman, Maria Vittoria Minniti +3
When dealing with the haptic teleoperation of multi-limbed mobile manipulators, the problem of mitigating the destabilizing effects arising from the communication link between the…
Whole-Body MPC for a Dynamically Stable Mobile Manipulator
Maria Vittoria Minniti, Farbod Farshidian, Ruben Grandia +1
Autonomous mobile manipulation offers a dual advantage of mobility provided by a mobile platform and dexterity afforded by the manipulator. In this paper, we present a whole-body o…
DTC: Deep Tracking Control
Fabian Jenelten, Junzhe He, Farbod Farshidian +1
Legged locomotion is a complex control problem that requires both accuracy and robustness to cope with real-world challenges. Legged systems have traditionally been controlled usin…
Divide, Discover, Deploy: Factorized Skill Learning with Symmetry and Style Priors
Rafael Cathomen, Mayank Mittal, Marin Vlastelica +1
Unsupervised Skill Discovery (USD) allows agents to autonomously learn diverse behaviors without task-specific rewards. While recent USD methods have shown promise, their applicati…
Wild Visual Navigation: Fast Traversability Learning via Pre-Trained Models and Online Self-Supervision
MatÃas Mattamala, Jonas Frey, Piotr Libera +5
Natural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In…
Whole-Body MPC and Online Gait Sequence Generation for Wheeled-Legged Robots
Marko Bjelonic, Ruben Grandia, Oliver Harley +3
Our paper proposes a model predictive controller as a single-task formulation that simultaneously optimizes wheel and torso motions. This online joint velocity and ground reaction…
Collaborative Robot Mapping using Spectral Graph Analysis
Lukas Bernreiter, Shehryar Khattak, Lionel Ott +3
In this paper, we deal with the problem of creating globally consistent pose graphs in a centralized multi-robot SLAM framework. For each robot to act autonomously, individual onbo…
Prior-SG: Task and Prior Driven Region Segmentation for Scene Graphs in Arbitrarily-Structured Environments
Giorgio Tonetti, Laurent Kneip, Abel Gawel +1
Hierarchical 3D scene graphs are a promising representation for high-level spatial reasoning in autonomous mobile platforms. However, existing extraction frameworks typically rely…
HEAP -- The autonomous walking excavator
Dominic Jud, Simon Kerscher, Martin Wermelinger +5
The demand and the potential for automation in the construction sector is unmatched, particularly for increasing environmental sustainability, improving worker safety and reducing…
DiskChunGS: Large-Scale 3D Gaussian SLAM Through Chunk-Based Memory Management
Casimir Feldmann, Maximum Wilder-Smith, Vaishakh Patil +4
Recent advances in 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) have demonstrated impressive results for novel view synthesis with real-time rendering capabilities. However, integrating 3DGS with…
Learned Perceptive Forward Dynamics Model for Safe and Platform-aware Robotic Navigation
Pascal Roth, Jonas Frey, Cesar Cadena +1
Ensuring safe navigation in complex environments requires accurate real-time traversability assessment and understanding of environmental interactions relative to the robot`s capab…
Learning Accurate Whole-body Throwing with High-frequency Residual Policy and Pullback Tube Acceleration
Yuntao Ma, Yang Liu, Kaixian Qu +1
Throwing is a fundamental skill that enables robots to manipulate objects in ways that extend beyond the reach of their arms. We present a control framework that combines learning…
Robust Ladder Climbing with a Quadrupedal Robot
Dylan Vogel, Robert Baines, Joseph Church +3
Quadruped robots are proliferating in industrial environments where they carry sensor payloads and serve as autonomous inspection platforms. Despite the advantages of legged robots…
Building Forest Inventories with Autonomous Legged Robots -- System, Lessons, and Challenges Ahead
MatÃas Mattamala, Nived Chebrolu, Jonas Frey +5
Legged robots are increasingly being adopted in industries such as oil, gas, mining, nuclear, and agriculture. However, new challenges exist when moving into natural, less-structur…
Contact-Implicit Trajectory Optimization for Dynamic Object Manipulation
Jean-Pierre Sleiman, Jan Carius, Ruben Grandia +2
We present a reformulation of a contact-implicit optimization (CIO) approach that computes optimal trajectories for rigid-body systems in contact-rich settings. A hard-contact mode…
Learning to Walk in Minutes Using Massively Parallel Deep Reinforcement Learning
Nikita Rudin, David Hoeller, Philipp Reist +1
In this work, we present and study a training set-up that achieves fast policy generation for real-world robotic tasks by using massive parallelism on a single workstation GPU. We…
Using large language models for embodied planning introduces systematic safety risks
Tao Zhang, Kaixian Qu, Zhibin Li +4
Large language models are increasingly used as planners for robotic systems, yet how safely they plan remains an open question. To evaluate safe planning systematically, we introdu…
Informed, Constrained, Aligned: A Field Analysis on Degeneracy-aware Point Cloud Registration in the Wild
Turcan Tuna, Julian Nubert, Patrick Pfreundschuh +3
The ICP registration algorithm has been a preferred method for LiDAR-based robot localization for nearly a decade. However, even in modern SLAM solutions, ICP can degrade and becom…
Fast Traversability Estimation for Wild Visual Navigation
Jonas Frey, Matias Mattamala, Nived Chebrolu +3
Natural environments such as forests and grasslands are challenging for robotic navigation because of the false perception of rigid obstacles from high grass, twigs, or bushes. In…
Advances, challenges, and opportunities for legged robots
Jonas Frey, MatÃas Mattamala, Hae-Won Park +5
Humanoid and quadrupedal robots have the potential to revolutionize the way we work, interact, and coexist with intelligent machines. To understand their effects on society and how…
What Matters in RL-Based Methods for Object-Goal Navigation? An Empirical Study and A Unified Framework
Hongze Wang, Boyang Sun, Jiaxu Xing +5
Object-Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) is a key capability for deploying mobile robots in everyday environments such as homes, schools, and workplaces. In this task, an agent must loca…
Learning Quiet Walking for a Small Home Robot
Ryo Watanabe, Takahiro Miki, Fan Shi +5
As home robotics gains traction, robots are increasingly integrated into households, offering companionship and assistance. Quadruped robots, particularly those resembling dogs, ha…
Towards Learning Boulder Excavation with Hydraulic Excavators
Jonas Gruetter, Lorenzo Terenzi, Pascal Egli +1
Construction sites frequently require removing large rocks before excavation or grading can proceed. Human operators typically extract these boulders using only standard digging bu…
Keep Rollin' - Whole-Body Motion Control and Planning for Wheeled Quadrupedal Robots
Marko Bjelonic, C. Dario Bellicoso, Yvain de Viragh +4
We show dynamic locomotion strategies for wheeled quadrupedal robots, which combine the advantages of both walking and driving. The developed optimization framework tightly integra…
Toward Hardware-Agnostic Quadrupedal World Models via Morphology Conditioning
Mohamad H. Danesh, Chenhao Li, Amin Abyaneh +5
World models promise a paradigm shift in robotics, where an agent learns the underlying physics of its environment once to enable efficient planning and behavior learning. However,…
Event-based Agile Object Catching with a Quadrupedal Robot
Benedek Forrai, Takahiro Miki, Daniel Gehrig +2
Quadrupedal robots are conquering various indoor and outdoor applications due to their ability to navigate challenging uneven terrains. Exteroceptive information greatly enhances t…
Beyond Cybathlon: On-demand Quadrupedal Assistance for People with Limited Mobility
Carmen Scheidemann, Andrei Cramariuc, Changan Chen +2
Background: Assistance robots have the potential to increase the independence of people who need daily care due to limited mobility or being wheelchair-bound. Current solutions of…
Cybathlon -- Legged Mobile Assistance for Quadriplegics
Carmen Scheidemann, Andrei Cramariuc, Marco Hutter
Assistance robots are the future for people who need daily care due to limited mobility or being wheelchair-bound. Current solutions of attaching robotic arms to motorized wheelcha…
Symmetry Considerations for Learning Task Symmetric Robot Policies
Mayank Mittal, Nikita Rudin, Victor Klemm +2
Symmetry is a fundamental aspect of many real-world robotic tasks. However, current deep reinforcement learning (DRL) approaches can seldom harness and exploit symmetry effectively…
Solving Multi-Entity Robotic Problems Using Permutation Invariant Neural Networks
Tianxu An, Joonho Lee, Marko Bjelonic +2
Challenges in real-world robotic applications often stem from managing multiple, dynamically varying entities such as neighboring robots, manipulable objects, and navigation goals.…
One-Shot Badminton Shuttle Detection for Mobile Robots
Florentin Dipner, William Talbot, Turcan Tuna +2
This paper presents a robust one-shot badminton shuttlecock detection framework for non-stationary robots. To address the lack of egocentric shuttlecock detection datasets, we intr…
A Fully-Integrated Sensing and Control System for High-Accuracy Mobile Robotic Building Construction
Abel Gawel, Hermann Blum, Johannes Pankert +9
We present a fully-integrated sensing and control system which enables mobile manipulator robots to execute building tasks with millimeter-scale accuracy on building construction s…
Efficient Model-Based Reinforcement Learning for Robot Control via Online Optimization
Fang Nan, Hao Ma, Qinghua Guan +3
We present an online model-based reinforcement learning algorithm suitable for controlling complex robotic systems directly in the real world. Unlike prevailing sim-to-real pipelin…
NaviTrace: Evaluating Embodied Navigation of Vision-Language Models
Tim Windecker, Manthan Patel, Moritz Reuss +5
Vision-language models demonstrate unprecedented performance and generalization across a wide range of tasks and scenarios. Integrating these foundation models into robotic navigat…
Multi-critic Learning for Whole-body End-effector Twist Tracking
Aravind Elanjimattathil Vijayan, Andrei Cramariuc, Mattia Risiglione +2
Learning whole-body control for locomotion and arm motions in a single policy has challenges, as the two tasks have conflicting goals. For instance, efficient locomotion typically…
Safe Robot Navigation via Multi-Modal Anomaly Detection
Lorenz Wellhausen, René Ranftl, Marco Hutter
Navigation in natural outdoor environments requires a robust and reliable traversability classification method to handle the plethora of situations a robot can encounter. Binary cl…
RSL-RL: A Learning Library for Robotics Research
Clemens Schwarke, Mayank Mittal, Nikita Rudin +2
RSL-RL is an open-source Reinforcement Learning library tailored to the specific needs of the robotics community. Unlike broad general-purpose frameworks, its design philosophy pri…
SpaceHopper: A Small-Scale Legged Robot for Exploring Low-Gravity Celestial Bodies
Alexander Spiridonov, Fabio Buehler, Moriz Berclaz +12
We present SpaceHopper, a three-legged, small-scale robot designed for future mobile exploration of asteroids and moons. The robot weighs 5.2kg and has a body size of 245mm while u…
Generating Continuous Motion and Force Plans in Real-Time for Legged Mobile Manipulation
Parker Ewen, Jean-Pierre Sleiman, Yuxin Chen +3
Manipulators can be added to legged robots, allowing them to interact with and change their environment. Legged mobile manipulation planners must consider how contact forces genera…
TAMOLS: Terrain-Aware Motion Optimization for Legged Systems
Fabian Jenelten, Ruben Grandia, Farbod Farshidian +1
Terrain geometry is, in general, non-smooth, non-linear, non-convex, and, if perceived through a robot-centric visual unit, appears partially occluded and noisy. This work presents…
Whole-Body MPC and Dynamic Occlusion Avoidance: A Maximum Likelihood Visibility Approach
Ibrahim Ibrahim, Farbod Farshidian, Jan Preisig +3
This paper introduces a novel approach for whole-body motion planning and dynamic occlusion avoidance. The proposed approach reformulates the visibility constraint as a likelihood…
Symmetry-Guided Memory Augmentation for Efficient Locomotion Learning
Kaixi Bao, Chenhao Li, Yarden As +2
Training reinforcement learning (RL) policies for legged locomotion often requires extensive environment interactions, which are costly and time-consuming. We propose Symmetry-Guid…
ANYmal Parkour: Learning Agile Navigation for Quadrupedal Robots
David Hoeller, Nikita Rudin, Dhionis Sako +1
Performing agile navigation with four-legged robots is a challenging task due to the highly dynamic motions, contacts with various parts of the robot, and the limited field of view…
3D Surfel Map-Aided Visual Relocalization with Learned Descriptors
Haoyang Ye, Huaiyang Huang, Marco Hutter +2
In this paper, we introduce a method for visual relocalization using the geometric information from a 3D surfel map. A visual database is first built by global indices from the 3D…
A Primer on the Differential Calculus of 3D Orientations
Michael Bloesch, Hannes Sommer, Tristan Laidlow +8
The proper handling of 3D orientations is a central element in many optimization problems in engineering. Unfortunately many researchers and engineers struggle with the formulation…
Large-Scale Autonomous Gas Monitoring for Volcanic Environments: A Legged Robot on Mount Etna
Julia Richter, Turcan Tuna, Manthan Patel +6
Volcanic gas emissions are key precursors of eruptive activity. Yet, obtaining accurate near-surface measurements remains hazardous and logistically challenging, motivating the nee…
Tripody: An Overconstrained 3-SPR-like Parallel Robot for High-Reach Construction Tasks
Julien Kindle, Jakub Raczy, Riccardo Balbi +3
Many ceiling construction tasks still rely on heavy serial manipulators that are difficult to deploy in cluttered interiors, motivating lightweight, field-ready alternatives that r…
Robots Need More than VLA and World Models
Elis Karcini, Faisal Mehrban, Quang Nguyen +6
Generalist robot intelligence is often framed as a policy-scaling problem: collect more robot demonstrations, train larger Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models, and expect broader g…
IN-Sight: Interactive Navigation through Sight
Philipp Schoch, Fan Yang, Yuntao Ma +3
Current visual navigation systems often treat the environment as static, lacking the ability to adaptively interact with obstacles. This limitation leads to navigation failure when…
DeepGait: Planning and Control of Quadrupedal Gaits using Deep Reinforcement Learning
Vassilios Tsounis, Mitja Alge, Joonho Lee +2
This paper addresses the problem of legged locomotion in non-flat terrain. As legged robots such as quadrupeds are to be deployed in terrains with geometries which are difficult to…
EgoHTR: Egocentric 4D Demonstrations of Human Terrain Traversal
Alex Brandes, Haig Conti Georges Sajelian, Manthan Patel +11
The paper introduces EgoHTR, a dataset of egocentric 4D human motion captured in complex, unstructured terrain using wearable sensors and a portable 3D scanner, and demonstrates it…
Advanced Skills by Learning Locomotion and Local Navigation End-to-End
Nikita Rudin, David Hoeller, Marko Bjelonic +1
The common approach for local navigation on challenging environments with legged robots requires path planning, path following and locomotion, which usually requires a locomotion c…
ROS-LLM: A ROS framework for embodied AI with task feedback and structured reasoning
Christopher E. Mower, Yuhui Wan, Hongzhan Yu +20
We present a framework for intuitive robot programming by non-experts, leveraging natural language prompts and contextual information from the Robot Operating System (ROS). Our sys…
ViserDex: Visual Sim-to-Real for Robust Dexterous In-hand Reorientation
Arjun Bhardwaj, Maximum Wilder-Smith, Mayank Mittal +2
In-hand object reorientation requires precise estimation of the object pose to handle complex task dynamics. While RGB sensing offers rich semantic cues for pose tracking, existing…
Path-conditioned Reinforcement Learning-based Local Planning for Long-Range Navigation
Mateo Haro, Julia Richter, Fan Yang +2
Long-range navigation is commonly addressed through hierarchical pipelines in which a global planner generates a path, decomposed into waypoints, and followed sequentially by a loc…
Learning Whole-Body Humanoid Locomotion via Motion Generation and Motion Tracking
Zewei Zhang, Kehan Wen, Michael Xu +7
Whole-body humanoid locomotion is challenging due to high-dimensional control, morphological instability, and the need for real-time adaptation to various terrains using onboard pe…
Versatile Multi-Contact Planning and Control for Legged Loco-Manipulation
Jean-Pierre Sleiman, Farbod Farshidian, Marco Hutter
Loco-manipulation planning skills are pivotal for expanding the utility of robots in everyday environments. These skills can be assessed based on a system's ability to coordinate c…
Dense 3D Reconstruction Through Lidar: A Comparative Study on Ex-vivo Porcine Tissue
Guido Caccianiga, Julian Nubert, Marco Hutter +1
New sensing technologies and more advanced processing algorithms are transforming computer-integrated surgery. While researchers are actively investigating depth sensing and 3D rec…