Exploring the limits of quadruped robot agility, particularly in the context of rapid and real-time planning and execution of omnidirectional jump trajectories, presents significant challenges due to the complex dynamics involved, especially when considering significant impulse contacts. This paper introduces a new framework to enable fast, omnidirectional jumping capabilities for quadruped robots. Utilizing minimum jerk technology, the proposed framework efficiently generates jump trajectories that exploit its analytical solutions, ensuring numerical stability and dynamic compatibility with minimal computational resources. The virtual model control is employed to formulate a Quadratic Programming (QP) optimization problem to accurately track the Center of Mass (CoM) trajectories during the jump phase. The whole-body control strategies facilitate precise and compliant landing motion. Moreover, the different jumping phase is triggered by time-schedule. The framework’s efficacy is demonstrated through its implementation on an enhanced version of the open-source Mini Cheetah robot. Omnidirectional jumps-including forward, backward, and other directional-were successfully executed, showcasing the robot’s capability to perform rapid and consecutive jumps with an average trajectory generation and tracking solution time of merely 50 microseconds.

Scene reconstructions are often incomplete due to occlusions and limited viewpoints. There have been efforts to use semantic information for scene completion. However, the completed shapes may be rough and imprecise since respective methods rely on 3D convolution and/or lack effective shape constraints. To overcome these limitations, we propose a semantic scene completion method based on deformable deep implicit templates (DDIT). Specifically, we complete each segmented instance in a scene by deforming a template with a latent code. Such a template is expressed by a deep implicit function in the canonical frame. It abstracts the shape prior of a category, and thus can provide constraints on the overall shape of an instance. Latent code controls the deformation of template to guarantee fine details of an instance. For code prediction, we design a neural network that leverages both intra-and inter-instance information. We also introduce an algorithm to transform instances between the world and canonical frames based on geometric constraints and a hierarchical tree. To further improve accuracy, we jointly optimize the latent code and transformation by enforcing the zero-valued isosurface constraint. In addition, we establish a new dataset to solve different problems of existing datasets. Experiments showed that our DDIT outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.

Abnormal event detection is an important task in research and industrial applications, which has received considerable attention in recent years. Existing methods usually rely on standard frame-based cameras to record the data and process them with computer vision technologies. In contrast, this paper presents a novel neuromorphic vision based abnormal event detection system. Compared to the frame-based camera, neuromorphic vision sensors, such as Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS), do not acquire full images at a fixed frame rate but rather have independent pixels that output intensity changes (called events) asynchronously at the time they occur. Thus, it avoids the design of the encryption scheme. Since events are triggered by moving edges on the scene, DVS is a natural motion detector for the abnormal objects and automatically filters out any temporally-redundant information. Based on this unique output, we first propose a highly efficient method based on the event density to select activated event cuboids and locate the foreground. We design a novel event-based multiscale spatio-temporal descriptor to extract features from the activated event cuboids for the abnormal event detection. Additionally, we build the NeuroAED dataset, the first public dataset dedicated to abnormal event detection with neuromorphic vision sensor. The NeuroAED dataset consists of four sub-datasets: Walking, Campus, Square, and Stair dataset. Experiments are conducted based on these datasets and demonstrate the high efficiency and accuracy of our method.

Learning by imitation is a powerful way that can reduce the complexly in searching space. It could help the mobile robot to acquire new skills from interaction with a human-being in natural way. In this paper, the dynamic movement primitives (DMPs) is utilized to imitate the trajectory from human walking. DMPs is a modified formulation of virtual spring-dampers (VSD) system that enjoys better fitting performance in learning. Further, while dealing with the trajectory tracking problem of mobile robots, a novel nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) approach is proposed for motion control. The nonlinear MPC scheme applies a new neural network named Varying-parameter Lagrangian Neural Network (VP-LNN) to solve a Quadratic Programming (QP) problem by iterating over a finite receding horizon. The new network of VP-LNN can converge to the global optimal solution. Thus, a new human-robot interaction (HRI) scheme for mobile robot is proposed, which can reduce the complexity in motion planning in various applications.