CAREER: Legged Locomotion Across Scales: Closing the Loop Between Task Planning and Motion Control

该奖项旨在为具有完全不同尺寸和形态的敏捷、高度移动的有腿机器人引入紧密集成的运动控制和运动规划策略。为了实现这些机器在实际应用中的潜力，必须将基本运动组合成更复杂的运动行为，以实现理想的高级规划目标。随着动态腿式机器人的能力越来越强，迫切需要层次一致的运动规划策略，将下降的任务级命令转换为适当的低级控制动作，以利用平台的运动能力。为了满足这一需求，这项工作追求新的方向(i)在动态腿的运动，通过提供运动原语的便携式库；（ii）在机器人控制方面，通过提供建设性的反馈减少策略和随机数据驱动方法，将复杂的腿式机器人平台映射到行为编码目标模型；（iii）在混合系统中，通过引入一个通过多层信息处理和控制动作来降低复杂性的框架。这项研究旨在使有腿的机器能够可靠有效地执行现实世界的任务。通过这种方式，它促进了许多不同的应用，包括需要高度移动和多功能机器人的工业，农业和应急响应应用。这项工作还包括大量的教育和社区外展组成部分，旨在吸引代表性不足的群体学习科学、技术、工程和数学。此外，通过将高中教师与研究生配对，这项努力解决了K-12教师保持最新状态的关键需求，并将他们的教学与大学课程的要求结合起来。

This award seeks to introduce tightly integrated locomotion control and motion planning strategies for agile, highly-mobile legged robots with radically different sizes and morphologies. To realize the potential of these machines in real-world applications, basic movements must be composed to synthesize more complex locomotion behaviors that achieve desirable high-level planning objectives. As dynamic legged robots are becoming increasingly more capable, the need for hierarchically consistent locomotion planning strategies that translate descending task-level commands to suitable low-level control actions that harness the platform's locomotion capabilities becomes pressing. To address this need, this effort pursues new directions (i) in dynamic legged locomotion, by offering a portable library of locomotion primitives; (ii) in robot control, by providing constructive feedback reduction strategies and stochastic data-driven methods that map complex legged robot platforms to behavior-encoding target models; and (iii) in hybrid systems, by introducing a framework for complexity reduction through multiple layers of information processing and control action. This research effort seeks to enable legged machines to perform real-world tasks reliably and efficiently. This way, it promotes many different applications, including industrial, agricultural, and emergency response applications that require highly mobile and versatile robots. This effort also includes substantial educational and community outreach components, aiming at attracting underrepresented groups to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. In addition, by pairing high-school teachers with graduate students, this effort addresses the critical need for K-12 teachers to stay current and articulate their teaching with the demands of college courses.