Robotics

A number of foot placement strategies for walking have been proposed that make use of widely varying model complexities. Although a number of successful demonstrations have been individually shown in simulation and on physical robots, it is difficult to make a direct performance comparison due to the large differences in hardware, gait generation strategy, control system gains, actuator saturation limits, sensor noise, and many other physical limitations. Here we present a quantitative stability comparison of four foot-placement strategies.

This paper presents a method for synthesizing motions of a humanoid robot that receives an object from a human, with focus on a natural object passing scenario where the human initiates the passing motion by moving an object towards the robot, which continuously adapts its motion to the observed human motion in real time.

This paper discusses several general ray-shooting algorithms and their applications to these problems in robotics.

In this work, we outline a theoretical framework for whole body inertial parameter estimation, including the unactuated floating base. Using a least squares minimization approach, conducted within the nullspace of unmeasured degrees of freedom, we are able to use a partial force sensor set for full-body estimation, e.g. using only joint torque sensors, allowing for estimation when contact force measurement is unavailable or unreliable (e.g. due to slipping, rolling contacts, etc.).

In this paper, we demonstrate that a neuromuscular controller built based on the human anatomical structure and motion data can realize human-like responses to unexpected disturbances during locomotion.

This paper investigates the optimization and control of biped walking motion on a rolling cylinder.

This paper investigates the effect of foot shape on biped locomotion. In particular, we consider planar biped robots whose feet are composed of curved surfaces at toe and heel and a flat section between them.

This paper proposes a new grasp force efficiency (GFE) measure that considers not only contact point locations but also the hand configuration and mechanism. GFE evaluates the largest wrench applied to the object that the grasp can resist with unit contact forces.

This paper describes a general method for systematically obtaining simplified models of humanoid robots. We demonstrate an application of derived models to humanoid robot balance control using linear quadratic regulators.

This paper presents an efficient algorithm for computing a distance measure between two compact convex sets Q and A, defined as the minimum scale factor such that the scaled Q is not disjoint from A.