Date of Award

2013

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Engineering (MSE)

Department

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Committee Chair

Farbod Fahimi

Committee Member

Letha Etzkorn

Committee Member

John Williams

Subject(s)

Robotics, Mobile robots, Robots--Motion, Robots--Control systems

Abstract

A redundancy resolution scheme to maintain a desired support force on the stance foot of a redundant humanoid robot is considered. The proposed motion planner will mitigate the effect of unknown external disturbances on the robot. For the first time, the proposed approach controls not only the position of the Zero-Moment-Point (ZMP), but also the reaction forces in the plane of the foot and the reaction moment normal to the plane of the foot. Consequently, both tipping of the robot and sliding of the foot are addressed. An acceleration level configuration control approach is used to find the optimum solution for joint accelerations of the robot to reproduce both the desired gait and support reactions as close as possible. The controller is demonstrated by simulating a humanoid robot. It is shown the proposed approach is effective in mitigating external disturbances while maintaining the desired body trajectory. Initial steps are taken to conduct hardware-based testing. A device to measure the six components of the support force and moment is assembled and calibrated. Communication with the actuators of the robot is established.

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