The Robotics Institute

Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute

Copyright notice: This material is presented to ensure timely dissemination of scholarly and technical work. Copyright and all rights therein are retained by authors or by other copyright holders. All persons copying this information are expected to adhere to the terms and constraints invoked by each author's copyright. These works may not be reposted without the explicit permission of the copyright holder.

Abstract

Motivated by an error-recovery locomotion problem, we propose a control technique for a complex mechanical system by decomposing the system dynamics into a collection of simplified models. The robot considered, The Rocking and Rolling Robot (RRRobot), is a high-centered round-bodied robot that locomotes on a plane by swinging its legs and rocking on its shell. We identify the elements contributing to locomotion through two steps: 1) decoupling the leg-body rotation dynamics from the body-plane contact kinematics, and 2) decoupling the body rotational dynamics into dynamics along each rotational axis. We show, using simulation, that such decoupling provides a good approximation to RRRobot's locomotion and use these models to find an approximate control solution for RRRobot: a mapping between planar translation and leg motions.

Notes

Associated Project(s): Legless Locomotion

Number of pages: 6

Text Reference

Ravi Balasubramanian, Alfred Rizzi, and Matthew T. Mason, "Toward Legless Locomotion Control," 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, October, 2006, pp. 5594 - 5599.

BibTeX Reference

@inproceedings{Balasubramanian_2006_5614,
   author = "Ravi Balasubramanian and Alfred Rizzi and Matthew T. Mason",
   title = "Toward Legless Locomotion Control",
   booktitle = "2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems",
   pages = "5594 - 5599",
   month = "October",
   year = "2006",
}

The Robotics Institute

Menu