Types of Robot Motion

Different kinds of motions are achieved with potentially very different robotic platforms. From left to right, top to bottom: ViperX, SO-100, Boston Dynamics’ Spot, Open-Duck, 1X’s NEO, Boston Dynamics’ Atlas.

In this short section, we’ll organize the space of robot behaviors so you can quickly recognize what kind of problem you’re solving and pick appropriate tools.

In the vast majority of instances, robotics deals with producing motion via actuating joints connecting nearly entirely-rigid links. A key distinction between focus areas in robotics is based on whether the generated motion modifies (1) the absolute state of the environment (via dexterity), (2) the relative state of the robot with respect to its environment (exercising mobility skills), or (3) a combination of the two.

At a high level, most problems fall into three categories:

Effects such as (1) are typically achieved through the robot, i.e. generating motion to perform an action inducing a desirable modification, effectively manipulating the environment (manipulation).

Motions like (2) may result in changes in the robot’s physical location within its environment. Generally, modifications to a robot’s location within its environment may be considered instances of the general locomotion problem, further specified as wheeled or legged locomotion based on whenever a robot makes use of wheels or leg(s) to move in the environment.

Lastly, an increased level of dynamism in the robot-environment interactions can be obtained combining (1) and (2), thus designing systems capable to interact with and move within their environment. This category is problems is typically termed mobile manipulation, and is characterized by a typically much larger set of control variables compared to either locomotion or manipulation alone.

Recently, the development of low-cost manipulators like the ALOHA, ALOHA-2 and SO-100/SO-101 platforms significantly lowered the barrier to entry to robotics, considering the increased accessibility of these robots compared to more traditional platforms like the Franka Emika Panda arm.

Cheaper, more accessible robots are starting to rival traditional platforms like the Panda arm platforms in adoption in resource-constrained scenarios. The SO-100, in particular, has a cost in the 100s of Euros, and can be entirely 3D-printed in hours, while the industrially-manufactured Panda arm costs tens of thousands of Euros and is not openly available.

The traditional body of work developed since the very inception of robotics is increasingly complemented by learning-based approaches. ML has indeed proven particularly transformative across the entire robotics stack, first empowering planning-based techniques with improved state estimation used for traditional planning and then end-to-end replacing controllers, effectively yielding perception-to-action methods.

While explicit models have proven fundamental in achieving important milestones towards the development of modern robotics, recent works leveraging implicit models proved particularly promising in surpassing scalability and applicability challenges via learning.

We’ll reuse this taxonomy in later units when we discuss datasets (modalities to record) and policies (what action chunks to predict) for each category.