A geometric perspective to robot nonlinear oscillations with application to locomotion

Abstract

Controlling motion at low energetic cost, both from mechanical and computational point of view, certainly constitutes one of the major locomotion challenges in biology and robotics. Jean-Paul Laumonde inspired the robotics research community by his geometric approach to understanding biological locomotion principles and transferring them to robots. On this line of thoughts, we attempt to demonstrate that robots can be designed and controlled to walk highly efficient by exploiting resonance body effects, increasing the performance compared to rigid body designs. To do so, however, legged robots need to achieve limit cycle motions of the highly coupled, non-linear body dynamics. This led us to the research of the still not very well understood phenomena of nonlinear system modal oscillations. It turns out that differential geometry is the adequate tool to frame this theory. I will present recent results in this direction from my ERC Advanced Grant project M-Runners.