Robotics Mobility

• How can robots use their motors and sensors to move around in an unstructured environment?
• You will understand how to design robot bodies and behaviors that recruit limbs also.
• And more general appendages to apply physical forces that confer reliable mobility in a complex and dynamic world also.
• We develop an approach to composing simple dynamical abstractions also.
• That partially automate the generation of complicated sensorimotor programs also.
• Specific topics that will be covered include Robotics Mobility in animals and robots also.
• Kinematics and dynamics of legged machines, and design of dynamical behavior via energy landscapes also.

Motivation and Background

• We start with a general consideration of animals, the exemplar of mobility in nature also.
• This leads us to adopt the stance of bio inspiration rather than biomimicry, i.e. extracting principles rather than appearances also.
• And applying them systematically to our machines also.
• A little more thinking about typical animal mobility leads us to focus on appendages  limbs and tails as sources of motion also.
• The second portion of the week offers a bit of background on the physical also.
• And mathematical foundations of limbed Robotics Mobility also.
• We start with a linear spring mass damper system and consider the second order ordinary differential equation also.
• That describes it as a first order dynamical system also.
• We then treat the simple pendulum the simplest revolute kinematic limb in the same manner.
• Just to give a taste for the nature of nonlinear dynamics that inevitably arise in robotics.
• We’ll finish with a treatment of stability and energy basins.

Behavioral & Physics

• We’ll start with behavioral components that take the form of what we call “templates:” very simple mechanisms.
• Whose motions are fundamental to the more complex limbed strategies employed by animal and robot locomotors.