7 accepted papers
Manipulation with legs on multi-pedal robots is not a new concept, but it has rarely been considered on wheel-legged robots due to their mechanical structure. This paper presents a mechanism that transitions between a wheel and a gripper, allowing wheel-legged robots to perform manipulation tasks wi
Most current bipedal robots were modeled with an assumption that there is no slip between the stance foot and ground. This paper relaxes that assumption and undertakes a comprehensive study of a compass gait biped with foot slipping. It is found that slips are most likely to happen near impact for a…
This paper presents an approach to show global controllability of a class of underactuated mechanical systems. This class of systems include gymnastic robots and the classic cart-pole system. For this class of systems, we can define a connection point, and design a damping controller u(t) with the L…
This letter extends the use of the velocity decomposition metric for underactuated mechanical systems to the design of an enhanced hybrid zero dynamics (HZD)-based controller for biped robots. The metric has been used to quantify the control authority of underactuated planar bipeds by measuring the
This research seeks greater efficiency for walking robots. Efficiency can be improved in two ways: better performance (i.e., less wasted motion) and reduced energy consumption. Fractional-order control is a pathway to both of these improvements because of the flexibility it offers in designing a con…
The dynamics of many large-scale robotic formation systems, including structured systems as well as some random scale-free networks of agents, can be accurately described using fractional-order differential equations. A fractional-order differential equation can contain derivative terms with non-int…
This paper computes all the continuous point-transformation symmetries for a planar multi-agent dynamical control system. The relative configuration among the agents is often the most important aspect of this problem, and this paper presents a method to “factor out” the location and orientation on t…