ABSTRACT
In this talk I will describe my work on kinematics, planning, control and analysis for whole-body mobile-manipulation. I’ll begin by modeling and analyzing the kinematics of multi-limbed legged robots rigorously; in doing so, I will describe explicitly the analogies between the classical kinematics of dexterous manipulation and legged robot stance adjustment. These kinematics generalize to other mobile bases, including wheeled and articulated ones. Using these tools, I’ll formulate a general local-planning-problem that can be solved efficiently, and whose properties give theoretical and practical insights about the capabilities of a particular robot stance or configuration. This local problem takes the form of a Quadratic Program, that can handle a vast number of naturally occurring goals and constraints easily, and can be solved at very high rates for use in the control-loop as well as for trajectory generation. I will describe some extensions, including modeling and analysis for combined force/motion control, as well as sensor-based stability using feedback. Finally, I’ll describe some preliminary work on stability definitions and analysis, and describe my interests and some of the topics I hope to work on in the future. Throughout the talk, I will show experiments and simulations using the RoboSimian and Surrogate mobile robots.