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GRASP Special Seminar: Fall 2008
Tuesday, October 14th , 1:00 p.m., 315 Levine Hall (3330 Walnut Street)
Ioannis Poulakakis
University of Michigan
Control Systems Laboratory
EECS Department
"Feedback Control of Monopedal Robot Running"
Abstract: As an alternative to traditional wheeled and tracked ground vehicles, biologically-inspired legged systems are becoming increasingly common. This talk will present work on the systematic design of feedback controllers for running motions in monopedal robots with compliant elements, emphasizing the careful analysis of the stability properties of the closed-loop system. The presentation will first discuss a simplified model based on an extension of the Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP) that includes torso dynamics asymmetrically coupled to the leg motion. Then, it will move on to more recent work on the control of a more complete model that accurately represents Thumper, a monopedal robot that was recently constructed in a collaborative effort between the University of Michigan and Carnegie Mellon University.
Biography: Since 2004, Ioannis has been working towards the completion of his Ph.D. degree at the University of Michigan under the supervision of Prof. Jessy Grizzle. He is registered in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and a member of the Control Systems Laboratory. From 2000 until 2004, he was working as an M.Eng. and then a Ph.D. student at the Centre for Intelligent Machines (CIM) at McGill University under the supervision of Prof. Martin Buehler. Prior to that he was with the Department of Mechanical Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens working with Prof. Evangelos Papadopoulos. Ioannis' current research interests are in the area of dynamics and control with application to robotic mechanical systems, specifically bipedal and quadrupedal robots and nonholonomic mobile manipulators.
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