Optimized control strategies for wheeled humanoids and mobile manipulators

Abstract

Optimizing the control of articulated mobile robots leads to emergent behaviors that improve the effectiveness, efficiency and stability of wheeled humanoids and dynamically stable mobile manipulators. Our simulated results show that optimization over the target pose, height and control parameters results in effective strategies for standing, acceleration and deceleration. These strategies improve system performance by orders of magnitude over existing controllers. This paper presents a simple controller for robot motion and an optimization method for choosing its parameters. By using whole-body articulation, we achieve new skills such as standing and unprecedented levels of performance for acceleration and deceleration of the robot base. We describe a new control architecture, present a method for optimization, and illustrate its functionality through two distinct methods of simulation.

Robot limbo: Optimized planning and control for dynamically stable robots under vertical obstacles

“…[24,25] While the dynamics of the system in this implementation are not as challenging as those of our previous systems, the combined parameter space for the controllers is much larger due to the sequential composition of multiple controller instances. The composition results in a difficult, large-scale optimization problem.…”

Position Control of the Single Spherical Wheel Mobile Robot by Using the Fuzzy Sliding Mode Controller

“…Recently, other researchers have developed similar robots [19,20]. Since the Ballbot is unstable, it requires active positioning control [21,22]. Otherwise the robot will simply fall over.…”

NimbRo Explorer: Semiautonomous Exploration and Mobile Manipulation in Rough Terrain

“…Robotic systems that explore and manipulate their environment have many potential applications, such as search and rescue, remote inspection, or planetary exploration (Borst et al., ; Deegan, Thibodeau, & Grupen, ; Guizzo & Deyle, ; Mehling, Strawser, Bridgwater, Verdeyen, & Rovekamp, ; Schenker, Huntsberger, Pirjanian, Baumgartner, & Tunstel, ; Stilman, Wang, Teeyapan, & Marceau, ). Robots operating within such real‐world environments will have to navigate in complex terrain and reach, physically interact, pick up, retrieve, and manipulate a variety of objects.…”