This paper explores the development of biomechanical models for evaluating a new class of passive mechanical implants for orthopedic surgery. The proposed implants take the form of passive engineered mechanisms, and will be used to improve the functional attachment of muscles to tendons and bone by modifying the transmission of...
Motivation: Many robots such as legged robots and prosthetic hands/arms are designed to interact with uncertain and time-varying environments to accomplish their tasks.
Observations on humans and animals during their daily tasks suggest that they adapt their leg compliance while traversing with different velocities on different grounds and adjust their...
Recent advances in multiagent learning have led to exciting new capabilities spanning fields as diverse as planetary exploration, air traffic control, military reconnaissance, and airport security. Such algorithms provide a tangible benefit over traditional control algorithms in that they allow fast responses, adapt to dynamic environments, and generally scale well....
Many animals and robots move through the world by coupling cyclical changes in shape called gaits to an interaction with the environment. Because mobility is an important aspect of such robots, a key metric when evaluating design and performance of mobile robots is the efficiency of their optimal gaits. The...
In recent years, SAR ADCs have been shown to acheive faster conversion times and improved power efficiencies due to their simple building blocks that are digital in nature and scale favorably with technology. High resolution ADCs with stringent noise requirement has led to the adoption of hybrid ADC architectures such...
In order to enable better visualization and understanding of the effect of the robot's geometry and inertia on the robot's trajectories, this dissertation proposes to use geometric mechanics to bridge the gap between the physical motion of a robot and its mathematical structure. The main focus of this research is...
Cooperative multiagent systems are used as solution concepts in many application domains including air traffic control, satellite communications, and extra planetary exploration. As systems become more distributed and complex, we observe three phenomena. First, these systems cannot be accurately modeled, rendering traditional model based control methods inadequate. Second, system parameters...
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...
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....
Multiagent learning with cooperative coevolutionary algorithms is a critical area of research, and is relevant to many real-world applications including air traffic control, distributed sensor network control, and game-theoretic applications such as border patrol. A key difficulty in multiagent learning is the credit assignment problem, where the impact of each...