We present a contact planner for complex legged locomotion tasks: standing up, climbing
stairs using a handrail, crossing rubble, and getting out of a car. The need for such a planner …

Purpose of review The purpose of this review is to clarify the problems and discuss the
recent research to achieve multi-contact activities by humanoid robots from the viewpoint of …

In this paper, we consider the problem of generating appropriate motions for a torque-
controlled humanoid robot that is assigned a multi-contact loco-manipulation task, ie, a task …

Performing a demanding manipulation task with a multi-legged loco-manipulation platform
may require the exploitation of multiple external contacts with different environment surfaces …

Abstract Sampling-based, search-based, and optimization-based motion planners are just
some of the different approaches developed for motion planning problems. Given the wide …

Humanoid robots dynamically navigate an environment by interacting with it via contact
wrenches exerted at intermittent contact poses. Therefore, it is important to consider …

We present a new spine solution for the locomotion of human-scale robots on steep, rocky
surfaces, known as linearly-constrained spines. The spine stiffness is low in the normal …

This letter presents a novel concept to support physically impaired humans in daily object
manipulation tasks with a robot. Given a user's manipulation sequence, we propose a …

Contact-based decision and planning methods are becoming increasingly important to
endow higher levels of autonomy for legged robots. Formal synthesis methods derived from …

As part of a feasibility study, this paper shows the NASA Valkyrie humanoid robot performing
an endto-end improvised explosive device (IED) response task. To demonstrate and …