The primary goal of this research was to identify the impacts that individual agricultural land uses have on fish communities in small streams located in the Willamette Valley of western Oregon. The diverse nature of the land use features of the valley provided a challenging but useful system for the...
Legged robots, while advancing quickly, have far to go before they can recover from major disturbances safely and consistently. Reflected inertia, which affects how quickly the actuators can physically respond to an environmental disturbance, and delay, which describes the time necessary for the controller to sense, re-plan, and respond to...
Legged locomotion in robotics benefits from engineered hardware dynamics such as configuration-dependent, nonlinear transmissions and compliance. This thesis introduces a novel cable driven leg that allows the design of configuration-dependent transmission ratios while also permitting the addition of compliance in line with the cables to achieve compliant legged locomotion. The...
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...
Modern walking robots have shown that dynamic gaits can be achieved without ankle motors. It seems logical that the additional control authority that they provide can be used to improve the stability of the walking gait against foot placement errors caused by low level control. This thesis develops and compares...
An Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) is an important part of a freestanding bipedal robot's state estimation system.
IMUs return translational accelerations and rotational velocities, which must be numerically integrated to obtain a robot's orientation.
This thesis documents the implementation of the IMU alignment and integration systems for the ATRIAS robot....
Design and control of legged robots is a popular field in the pursuit of building robots that can be as mobile as humans. While much effort is put into understanding how to control the dynamics of these legs, less effort is focused on designing and controlling robot ankles. Ankles on...
Bipedal robots represent a unique class of control problems that combine many of the most difficult elements of nonlinear control. These robots are typically designed to be mobile and as such have limited energy and actuator authority making efficiency a prime concern. Unlike wheeled robots, legged robots must transition between...
For robotic manipulation tasks in uncertain environments, research typically revolves around developing the best possible software control strategy. However, the passive dynamics of the mechanical system, including inertia, stiffness, damping and torque limits, often impose performance limitations that cannot be overcome with software control. Discussions about the passive dynamics are...
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...