(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009-12)
Stilman, Mike; Wang, Jiuguang; Teeyapan, Kasemsit; Marceau, Ray
Optimizing the control of articulated mobile
robots leads to emergent behaviors that improve the effectiveness,
efficiency and stability of wheeled humanoids and
dynamically stable mobile manipulators. Our simulated results
show that optimization over the target pose, height and
control parameters results in effective strategies for standing,
acceleration and deceleration. These strategies improve system
performance by orders of magnitude over existing controllers.
This paper presents a simple controller for robot motion and
an optimization method for choosing its parameters. By using
whole-body articulation, we achieve new skills such as standing
and unprecedented levels of performance for acceleration and
deceleration of the robot base. We describe a new control
architecture, present a method for optimization, and illustrate
its functionality through two distinct methods of simulation.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2009)
Wang, Jiuguang; Rogers, Philip; Parker, Lonnie T.; Brooks, Douglas Antwonne; Stilman, Mike
This paper describes our successful implementation
of a robot that autonomously and strategically removes
multiple blocks from an unstable Jenga tower. We present an integrated strategy for perception, planning and control that
achieves repeatable performance in this challenging physical
domain. In contrast to previous implementations, we rely only
on low-cost, readily available system components and use
strategic algorithms to resolve system uncertainty. We present a
three-stage planner for block extraction which considers block
selection, extraction order, and physics-based simulation that
evaluates removability. Existing vision techniques are combined
in a novel sequence for the identification and tracking of blocks
within the tower. Discussion of our approach is presented
following experimental results on a 5-DOF robot manipulator.