ABSTRACT
Science fiction has long promised a world of robotic possibilities: from humanoid robots in the home, to wearable robotic devices that restore and augment human capabilities, to swarms of autonomous robotic systems forming the backbone of the cities of the future, to robots enabling exploration of the cosmos. With the goal of ultimately achieving these capabilities on robotic systems, this talk will present a unified optimization-based control framework for realizing dynamic behaviors in an efficient, provably stable (via control Lyapunov functions) and safety-critical fashion (as guaranteed by control barrier functions). The application of these ideas will be demonstrated experimentally on a wide variety of robotic systems, including swarms of rolling and flying robots with guaranteed collision-free behavior, bipedal and humanoid robots capable of achieving dynamic walking and running behaviors that display the hallmarks of natural human locomotion, and robotic assistive devices aimed at restoring mobility. The ideas presented will be framed in the broader context of seeking autonomy on robotic systems with the goal of getting robots into the real-world.