Dean of the College and Computer Science Program Present
Walking Softly: How Compliance Can Improve Legged Robot Locomotion
Tuesday, November 22, 2022
RKC 111
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Sonia Roberts, Northeastern University
Traditional robots are rigid and operate in well defined, predictable environments. As we have begun to build for and deploy robots in the real world, roboticists have typically sped up the planning and control methods used in traditional robotics so that they can recover from mistakes faster rather than developing methods that are inherently robust to uncertainty. This talk will consider how robots can use compliance to improve their ability to walk and run in the real world, offloading some of the mental model-building and high-level control to low-level controllers or even the physical body of the robot. We will use the application of legged robots to collect environmental data in natural deserts to motivate the need for new, inherently robust control methods, and we will then discuss how compliant materials -- namely, knitted fabric -- could be used to build the robots of the future. Could we use knitting machines to "3D print" robots with arbitrary morphologies and compliance properties for different tasks?For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: RKC 111