The first meeting is scheduled on August 23, 2024, at 10:15 am; and will be at Elektro E/F: EL23
Romtimeplan: https://tp.educloud.no/ntnu/timeplan/?type=room&id=341E404 Kart: http://use.mazemap.com/?v=1&campuses=ntnu&sharepoitype=identifier&sharepoi=341-E404
Performing agile and human-like movements of robots exhibiting by demand natural locomotion patterns (walking, running, skating, jumping) or featuring formats of interaction with external environments or objects (grasping, manipulating, pushing, juggling) are ones of the challenging tasks for today's robotics, where satisfactory solutions in hardware, sensors, modeling and algorithms are far from being found and standardized. Despite the long history, the substantial technological progress in sensing/actuating robots, and enormous studies of human/animal motions, we still live without a variety of intelligent crawling/walking/running mechanisms and assistive robotic hands that help at home or office, entertain in cafés, theaters and museums, nurse at hospitals, and educate at schools.
Among other reasons for this status, one can mention a deficit of fundamental concepts and rigorous mathematical tools for analysis and for control of agile behaviors of robots exposed to dynamic constraints describing the physics of the interaction of robot with external environment (floor to locomote) or with external object (apple to grasp and manipulate). The topic is attractive to young researchers and motivates students for re-considering the classical settings and available tools for motion planning and motion control for highly nonlinear dynamic systems in understanding functionality of mechanisms.
The course helps students systematically explore topics of modern robotics and nonlinear control theory focused on developing scalable methods for performing and analyzing agile movements of dynamically constrained robotic systems. Modeling, motion planning and control algorithms for such systems become important and unavoidable, for instance, in describing problem settings for automating various labor-intensive tasks such as grasping, manipulating or handling of external objects performed nowadays in industry and service applications primarily by humans. Most of dynamic constraints in applications are case specific or linked to scenarios of work of mechanisms. Meanwhile, some constraints are generic and can be simultaneously present in describing behaviors of quite distant nonlinear systems. Constraints due to underactuation provide examples of such generic structural features of nonlinear mechanical systems.
The first part of lectures emphasize challenges of model based and first principles approaches to handle and overcome such and similar constraints. The second part of the course includes lectures devoted to illustrating theoretical arguments, and to practicing on available software and hardware realization of the method developed for solving trajectory planning and control assignments for performing non-prehensile manipulation of a passive disc on a hand of a Butterfly robot. The idea of the robot and the problem to be solved can be devised from the movies: