Collaborative Research: Dynamic Movement in Bipedal Locomotion

研究人员将研究如何使机器人能够执行真正的动态运动，如跑步，跳跃，转弯，快速启动和突然停止。 对于一个灵活而聪明地对不断变化的环境做出反应的机器人来说，它必须被赋予比目前实现的功能行为更多的功能行为。该项目将解决周期性和非周期性动态运动共同面临的四个基本挑战。首先，分析建模和高保真动态模拟将结合起来，以开发动态稳定性的定量指标的基础上，从干扰中恢复所需的智能水平。其次，进化机器人策略将被用来有效地搜索大的，不连续的，不规则的解决方案空间，以产生真正的动态运动。 第三，将开发一种高速、抗漂移的传感方法，通过将定位和姿态传感问题分为姿态和飞行部分，该方法对环境的大影响具有鲁棒性。第四，将开发一种高效的混合驱动方法，其中电动机直接驱动髋关节的自由度，并与新颖的空气弹簧系统一起提供轴向推力。 最后，解决这四个挑战的工作将通过构建一个能够稳健地执行基本动态运动的三维机器人进行实验验证。 该项目的结果将广泛影响腿式机器人领域，因为动态稳定性、复杂运动生成、高速传感和高效驱动等核心问题并不是双足结构所独有的。

The investigators will study how to enable biped robots to execute truly dynamic movements such as running, jumping, turning, starting rapidly, and stopping suddenly. For a biped to react flexibly and intelligently to changing surroundings, it must be endowed with a greater set of functional behaviors than those that are currently realized. The project will address four fundamental challenges common to periodic and aperiodic dynamic movements. First, analytical modeling and high fidelity dynamic simulation will be combined to develop quantitative metrics of dynamic stability based upon the level of intelligence required for recovery from disturbance. Second, evolutionary robotics strategies will be employed to efficiently search the large, discontinuous, and irregular solution space in order to generate truly dynamic movements. Third, a high-speed, drift-resistant sensing approach will be developed that is robust to large impacts with the environment by dividing the localization and attitude sensing problem into stance and flight segments. Fourth, an efficient, hybrid actuation approach will be developed in which electric motors actuate the hip degrees of freedom directly and, together with a novel air-spring system, provide the axial thrust. Finally, the work addressing these four challenges will be experimentally validated by constructing a three-dimensional biped capable of robustly executing fundamental dynamic movements. The results of this project will broadly impact the field of legged robotics since the core issues of dynamic stability, complex motion generation, high-speed sensing, and efficient actuation are not unique to a bipedal structure.