4 accepted papers
Rigid body dynamics calculations are needed for many tasks in robotics, including online control. While there currently exist several competing software implementations that are sufficient for use in traditional control approaches, emerging sophisticated motion control techniques such as nonlinear m…
Robotics applications often suffer from the `two-language problem', requiring a low-level language for performance-sensitive components and a high-level language for interactivity and experimentation, which tends to increase software complexity. We demonstrate the use of the Julia programming langua…
Guided policy search is a popular approach for training controllers for high-dimensional systems, but it has a number of pitfalls. Non-convex trajectory optimization has local minima, and non-uniqueness in the optimal policy itself can mean that independently-optimized samples do not describe a cohe…
A fundamental requirement for legged robots is to maintain balance and prevent potentially damaging falls whenever possible. As a response to outside disturbances, fall prevention can be achieved by a combination of active balancing actions, e.g. through ankle torques and upper-body motion, and thro…