Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Yu, Chen, Matthews, David, Wang, Jingxian, Gu, Jing, Blackiston, Douglas, Rubenstein, Michael, Kriegman, Sam
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Yu, Chen
Matthews, David
Wang, Jingxian
Gu, Jing
Blackiston, Douglas
Rubenstein, Michael
Kriegman, Sam
author_facet Yu, Chen
Matthews, David
Wang, Jingxian
Gu, Jing
Blackiston, Douglas
Rubenstein, Michael
Kriegman, Sam
contents Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological counterparts, legged machines have largely converged over the past decade to canonical quadrupedal and bipedal architectures that cannot be easily reconfigured to meet new tasks or recover from injury. Here we introduce autonomous modular legs: agile yet minimal, single-degree-of-freedom jointed links that can learn complex dynamic behaviors and may be freely attached to form multilegged machines at the meter scale. This enables rapid repair, redesign, and recombination of highly-dynamic modular agents that move quickly and acrobatically (non-quasistatically) through unstructured environments. Because each module is itself a complete agent, the bodies that contain them can sustain deep structural damage that would completely disable other legged robots. We also show how to encode the vast space of possible body configurations into a compact latent design space that can be efficiently explored, revealing a wide diversity of novel legged forms.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00784
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots
Yu, Chen
Matthews, David
Wang, Jingxian
Gu, Jing
Blackiston, Douglas
Rubenstein, Michael
Kriegman, Sam
Robotics
Legged machines are becoming increasingly agile and adaptive but they have so far lacked the morphological diversity of legged animals, which have been rearranged and reshaped to fill millions of niches. Unlike their biological counterparts, legged machines have largely converged over the past decade to canonical quadrupedal and bipedal architectures that cannot be easily reconfigured to meet new tasks or recover from injury. Here we introduce autonomous modular legs: agile yet minimal, single-degree-of-freedom jointed links that can learn complex dynamic behaviors and may be freely attached to form multilegged machines at the meter scale. This enables rapid repair, redesign, and recombination of highly-dynamic modular agents that move quickly and acrobatically (non-quasistatically) through unstructured environments. Because each module is itself a complete agent, the bodies that contain them can sustain deep structural damage that would completely disable other legged robots. We also show how to encode the vast space of possible body configurations into a compact latent design space that can be efficiently explored, revealing a wide diversity of novel legged forms.
title Agile legged locomotion in reconfigurable modular robots
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00784