General literature for legged locomotion

Pick one afternoon a week, to spend primarily reading (not UROPs).
I know I said you should be efficient with reading papers, but honestly, at the beginning it takes just reading a lot to get the experience of reading papers. Better to read a bit more than too little.
Absolutely read first (and immediately) the Whitesides paper.
The rest, you should actually prioritize papers that are relevant to your own research, that you find yourself. But when you’re not sure what to read, skim this list and pick something that sounds interesting: if not directly relevant, at least it’s a somewhat curated list of papers I think are interesting.

Tips for reading papers

Check first to see if the project has a video, which usually summarizes it nicely. Decide based on this if it is worth digging deeper.
Make a first pass to get the high-level gist: read the abstract, the figures and captions, then skim the paper and look for the problem setting and contribution: these are typically at the end of an introduction and end of the paper, respectively. Sometimes these aren’t made explicit, that’s the authors’ fault. Decide based on this if it is worth digging deeper.
Don’t be bothered if you don’t understand all the details, even after multiple passes; just make sure you understand what you need.
Don’t assume the authors haven’t made mistakes just because the paper is published.

Favorites

• Design of Materials and Mechanisms for Responsive Robots
• Don't break a leg: running birds from quail to ostrich prioritise leg safety and economy on uneven terrain
• Formulation and Preparation for Numerical Evaluation of Linear Complementarity Systems in Dynamics
• Froude and the contribution of naval architecture to our understanding of bipedal locomotion
• Online Gait Transitions and Disturbance Recovery for Legged Robots via the Feasible Impulse Set
• Science and Statistics
• The 3-D Spring-Mass Model Reveals a Time-Based Deadbeat Control for Highly Robust Running and Steering in Uncertain Environments

Mine

• Beyond basins of attraction: Quantifying robustness of natural dynamics
• A Learnable Safety Measure (I kinda like the 11-page v1 on arxiv more)
• A little Damping goes a long way
• Safe Value Functions (heavy math)

General Knowledge

• Whitesides' group: writing a paper
• Science and statistics

Reviews

• Reinforcement learning in robotics: A survey
• Design of materials and mechanisms for responsive robots
• Central pattern generators for locomotion control in animals and robots: a review.
• Froude and the contribution of naval architecture to our understanding of bipedal locomotion
• Legged Robots that Balance

Design

• Atrias: Design and validation of a tether-free 3d-capable spring-mass bipedal robot
• Anymal-a highly mobile and dynamic quadrupedal robot
• Facilitating model-based control through software-hardware co-design
• Passive dynamic walking
• Actuator design for high force proprioceptive control in fast legged locomotion
• Mini cheetah: A platform for pushing the limits of dynamic quadruped control
• An open torque-controlled modular robot architecture for legged locomotion research
• Mechanical antagonism in legged robots

Dynamics

Biomech understanding

• Running over rough terrain reveals limb control for intrinsic stability
• A muscle-reflex model that encodes principles of legged mechanics produces human walking dynamics and muscle activities.
• Unpredictability of escape trajectory explains predator evasion ability and microhabitat preference of desert rodents
• Scaling of sensorimotor control in terrestrial mammals

Simple models

• Compliant leg behaviour explains basic dynamics of walking and running.
• The spring-mass model for running and hopping. Blickhan
• Capturability- based analysis and control of legged locomotion, part 1: Theory and appli- cation to three simple gait models
• Similarity in multilegged locomotion: Bouncing like a monopode
• The 3-d spring–mass model reveals a time-based deadbeat control for highly robust running and steering in uncertain environments
• Basin of attraction of the simplest walking model
• Energetics of actively powered locomotion using the simplest walking model
• Templates and anchors: Neuromechanical hypotheses of legged loco- motion on land

Misc

• Constructing predictive models of human running
• Metastable walking machines
• On designing an active tail for legged robots: Simplifying control via de- coupling of control objectives

Control

Model-based

• Viability and predictive control for safe locomotion
• Control of a walking biped using a combination of simple policies
• High-speed humanoid running through control with a 3d-slip model
• “Virtual model control: An intuitive approach for bipedal locomotion
• Whole-body motion planning with centroidal dynamics and full kinematics
• Footstep planning on uneven terrain with mixed- integer convex optimization
• Online gait transitions and disturbance recovery for legged robots via the feasible impulse set
• Why off-the-shelf physics simulators fail in evaluating feedback controller performance-a case study for quadrupedal robots

Learning

• Learning to walk in minutes using massively parallel deep reinforcement learning
• Learning to walk in 20 minutes
• Illuminating search spaces by mapping elites
• High-dimensional continuous control using generalized advantage estimation
• Learning hand-eye coordination for robotic grasping with deep learning and large-scale data collection
• Mastering the game of go without human knowledge
• Learning agile and dynamic motor skills for legged robots
• Feedback controller parameterizations for reinforcement learning
• Learning locomotion skills using deeprl: Does the choice of action space matter?
• Shaping as a method for accelerating reinforcement learning
• Curriculum learning for motor skills
• Learning locomotion skills for cassie: Iterative design and sim-to-real
• Bayesian optimization using domain knowledge on the atrias biped
• Contact invariant model learning for legged robot locomotion