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The current performance gap between legged animals and legged robots is large. Animals can reach high locomotion speed in complex terrain, or run at a low cost of transport. They are able to rapidly sense their environment, process sensor data, learn and plan locomotion strategies, and execute feedforward and feedback controlled locomotion patterns fluently on the fly. Animals use hardware that has, compared to the latest man-made actuators, electronics, and processors, relatively low bandwidth, medium power density, and low speed. The most common approach to legged robot locomotion is still assuming rigid linkage hardware, high torque actuators, and model based control algorithms with high bandwidth and high gain feedback mechanisms. State of the art robotic demonstrations such as the 2015 DARPA challenge showed that seemingly trivial locomotion tasks such as level walking, or walking over soft sand still stops most of our biped and quadruped robots. This talk focuses on an alternative class of legged robots and control algorithms designed and implemented on several quadruped and biped platforms, for a new generation of legged robotic systems. Biomechanical blueprints inspired by nature, and mechanisms from locomotion neurocontrol were designed, tested, and can be compared to their biological counterparts. We focus on hardware and controllers that allow comparably cheap robotics, in terms of computation, control, and mechanical complexity. Our goal are highly dynamic, robust legged systems with low weight and inertia, relatively low mechanical complexity and cost of transport, and little computational demands for standard locomotion tasks. Ideally, such system can also be used as testing platforms to explain not yet understood biomechanical and neurocontrol aspects of animals.
Alexander Sprowitz (MPI.IS, Physical Intelligence Dept.)
Alexander Sprowitz is a researcher at the Physical Intelligence Department at the Max-Planck Institute in Stuttgart. Before, he was working on a cooperative research project at the Royal Veterinary College in London, UK (with Prof. Monica Daley) and at the Oregon State University in Corvallis, USA (with Prof. Jonathan Hurst), where he studied bipedal locomotion in running birds (numida meleagris) and bipedal locomotion of the human-sized compliant robot ATRIAS. Alexander developed a family of compliant, CPG driven quadruped robots (Cheetah-cub, Bobcat robot, Oncilla robot) together with colleagues at the Biorobotics Laboratory at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland. His PhD thesis (with supervision of Prof. Auke Jan Ijspeert) was the development of the self-reconfiguring modular robotic system Roombots. With the supervision of Dr. Luc Berthouze he conducted research on a CPG closed-loop, small humanoid hopping robot at AIST in Tsukuba, Japan. Alex's current research focus is on the co-design of rhythm generators for locomotion controllers, biomechanically inspired compliant leg and robot mechanisms, and bio-inspired sensors. He is applying these mechanisms to research biomechanical blueprints of dynamic legged locomotion in robots and animals.