5 accepted papers
We describe a minimalistic robot mechanism that is capable of many construction behaviors in dry granular material including locomotion, climbing, leveling, subtraction, addition, transport, and burrowing. The design extends upon a single-actuator wave mechanism with the insight that the tails can b
We introduce Pressure Field Contact (PFC), an approximate model for predicting the contact surface, pressure distribution, and net contact wrench between nominally rigid objects. PFC combines and generalizes two ideas: a bed of springs (an `elastic foundation') and hydrostatic pressure. Continuous p…
We present a method for designing a walking controller for the walking robot Cornell Ranger. Our goal is a controller that can be designed using model-based optimization, and then transferred directly to the robot without the need for after-the-fact hand-tuning. The structure of the controller is hi
We present an approach to high-level control for bipedal walking exemplified with a 2D point-mass inextensible-legs inverted-pendulum model. Balance control authority here is only from step position and trailing-leg push-off, both of which are bounded to reflect actuator limits. The controller is de…
Before designing a controller in detail, we ask this question: for a given robot state, and every possible control action, what is the minimum number of steps needed to get to a given target state (if it is possible to do so)? Our biped model is a 2D inverted pendulum with massless legs. We have two…