Events Calendar

AME Seminar

Speaker: Quan Nguyen, MIT

Talk Title: Extremely Agile and Robust Legged Robots

Abstract: The mobility of man-made machines is still limited to relatively flat grounds, whereas humans and animals can traverse almost all surfaces of the earth including rocky cliffs or collapsed buildings.

In this talk, I will pose the question How can we make robots with similar morphologies achieve such extremely agile and robust behaviors? Enabling robots to exhibit such behaviors will one day facilitate robotic space exploration, disaster response, construction, etc. Furthermore, such time and safety critical missions also require robots to operate swiftly and stably while dealing with high levels of uncertainty and large external disturbances.

To achieve these capabilities, a unified adaptive control framework will be presented, that enables the ability to enforce stability and safety critical constraints arising from robotic motion tasks under a high level of model uncertainty. Next, I will present novel optimization-based approaches to address the challenge of dynamic robotic walking over randomly generated stepping stones, and optimized jumping on high platforms. I will then show how these can be translated to real world experiments, that enables (a) ATRIAS, a bipedal robot at CMU, to walk dynamically on stepping stones, and (b) MIT Cheetah 3 robot to jump up onto and jump down from a desk.

Host: AME Department

Location: 150

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Tessa Yao