Wildland fire refers to an unpredictable and uncontrollable fire that happens in wildland areas. Regardless of the beneficial impacts of wildland fires on ecosystems, the destructive impacts of wildfires on air quality, economy, public health, etc. are considerable. An essential goal in the fire community is that the wildland fires...
The objective of this study is to propose control strategies for legged robots to walk and run naturally like humans and animals. To achieve this goal, we use the spring-mass model for the legged robots to be able to create the same dynamics in the leg as humans and animals....
We seek the control strategies that are applicable on legged robots and control them to run in real world as robust and efficient as animals. To achieve this goal, we need to understand the principles of legged locomotion and the control policies that animals use during running. In this study...
Clean technologies can address multiple challenges associated with climate change, environmental protection, and human health. However, the impact desired by introduction of such technologies is achievable only if new options effectively replace inefficient, conventional practices. This ‘design for adoption’ requires understanding of user motivations, associated beliefs, context of use, and...
A chair, once placed, will stay put until moved. Or will it? With the rise of technology being embeddable into everyday objects, what if that chair could move itself? Such robotic furniture has been featured in advertisements, art, and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research. Existing methods for operating robotic furniture have...
Practical bipedal robots need to be simultaneously efficient, robust, and versatile machines, but designing robots dynamically capable of these demands has been a significant bottleneck. We designed ATRIAS to be a highly dynamic biped capable of both walking and running untethered in real environments. To meet these goals, ATRIAS is...
This thesis details the derivation and application of template-based controls on a bipedal robot, as well as a description of the software framework that enabled experimentation. The software framework uses a combination of open-source tools including ROS, OROCOS, EtherCAT, and Xenomai to create a real-time environment for the controllers. The...
Bipedal locomotion is a complex phenomenon to understand and control, making it difficult for legged robots to achieve the speed, agility, efficiency, and robustness of their animal counterparts. This thesis argues for the use of numerical optimization to investigate and implement bipedal control as it applies to biology, dynamical models,...
Mechanical design is often based on formal methodologies such as Quality Function Deployment. Techniques to quantitatively account for attractability, sensory perception, and affective design have been successfully incorporated into these methods and are receiving growing acceptance across many industries. Although the adoption of these methods marks a large improvement for...
Robotic limbs have been shown to enable mobility in unstructured, real-world terrain; they allow robots to step around cluttered environments, scramble up hills, carry heavy loads, and even perform acrobatics. However, mechanical limbs cannot operate as a means for such dynamic locomotion if they are simply treated as general articulated...