Motion planning research has been successful in developing planning algorithms which are effective for solving problems with complicated geometric and kinematic constraints. Various applications in robotics and in other fields demand additional physical realism. Some progress has been made for non-holonomic systems. However systems with significant drift, underactuation and discrete system chan...

This paper applies a recently developed geometric PID controller to stabilize a three-link planar bipedal hybrid dynamic walking model. The three links represent the robot torso and two kneeless legs, with an independent control torque available at each hip joint. The geometric PID controller is derived for fully actuated mechanical systems, however in the swing phase the three-link biped robot...

This letter studies jumping for wheeled-bipedal robots, a motion that takes full advantage of the benefits from hybrid wheeled and legged design features. A comprehensive hierarchical scheme planning control with robots is developed. Underactuation dynamics main difficulty to be addressed, especially in problem. To tackle this issue, novel wheeled-spring-loaded inverted pendulum (W-SLIP) model ...

The intrinsically underactuated and nonlinear nature of continuum soft robots makes the derivation provably stable feedback control laws a challenging task. Most works so far circumvented issue either by looking at coarse fully-actuated approximations dynamics or imposing quasi-static assumptions. In this letter, we move step in direction controlling generic taking explicitly into account their...

Abstract: For a quadrotor, one can identify the two well-known inherent rotorcraft characteristics: underactuation and strong coupling in pitch-yaw-roll. To confront these problems and design a station-keeping and tracking controller, dynamic inversion is used. Typical applications of dynamic inversion require the selection of the output control variables to render the internal dynamics stable....

Recently, (Udwadia, 2003) suggested to derive tracking controllers for mechanical systems with redundant degrees-of-freedom (DOFs) using a generalization of Gauss’ principle of least constraint. This method allows reformulating control problems as a special class of optimal controllers. In this paper, we take this line of reasoning one step further and demonstrate that several well-known and al...

This paper presents recent research efforts to extend the functionality of unmanned aerial vehicles beyond passive observation to active interaction with and manipulation of objects. The archetypical aerial manipulation task — grasping objects during flight — is difficult due to the unstable dynamics of flying vehicles and limited positional accuracy currently demonstrated by hovering vehicles....

Work by the authors published elsewhere addressed the problem of designing controllers that induce exponentially stable, periodic walking motions at a given fixed speed for a 5-link, planar biped robot with one degree of underactuation in single support. The key technical tool was the hybrid zero dynamics, a 1-DOF invariant subdynamics of the full robot model. Further exploiting the features of...

Hand synergies, or joint coordination patterns, have become an effective tool for achieving versatile robotic grasping with simple hands or planning algorithms. Here we propose a method to determine the hand synergies such that they can be physically implemented in an underactuated fashion. Given a kinematic hand model and a set of desired grasps, our algorithm optimizes a Mechanically Realizab...

Control of compliant mechanical systems is increasingly being researched for several applications including flexible link robots and ultra-precision positioning systems. The control problem in these systems is challenging, especially with gravity coupling and large deformations, because of inherent underactuation and the combination of lumped and distributed parameters of a nonlinear system. In...