Broad Area Colloquium For AI-Geometry-Graphics-Robotics-Vision
Low Impedance Robotics
Gill A. Pratt
MIT Leg Lab / AI Lab
Monday, Oct 30, 2000, 4:15PM
TCseq200, Lecture Hall A
http://robotics.stanford.edu/ba-colloquium/
Abstract
Almost all robots, including current walking robots, embody a "stiffer is
better" design and control philosophy inherited from the earliest days of
numerically controlled machine tools, where position accuracy in the face of
unpredictable force disturbances was of paramount importance. This
philosophy
is so pervasive that is has become part of the cultural definition of a
robot
(ask any child to walk like a robot and you'll see). By contrast, the
impedance of animals (including humans) is low. We cannot hold positions
very
accurately in the face of unexpected force disturbances. What we can do is
execute natural tasks, like locomotion, manipulation and prey catching, with
breathtaking agility and grace. Previous work by McGeer and others has shown
that the passive dynamics of an animal's body acts to self-stabilize and
automatically sequence some movements. Unfortunately, in today's stiff,
trajectory controlled robots, such natural dynamics are over-ridden.
For several years our laboratory has developed and experimented with a
family
of low-impedance actuators, mechanisms, and control philosophies that allow
our robots and human augmentation devices to interact with the world more
softly - more like animals. This talk will describe our ideas, show videos
of
our experiments, and talk about future directions of research.
About the Speaker
Gill A. Pratt is an Assistant Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and co-directs the MIT Leg Laboratory. He received his
Bachelor's,
Master's, and Ph.D. Degrees from MIT from the department of Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science in 1983, 1987, and 1989, respectively.
bac-coordinators@cs.stanford.edu
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Last modified: Wed Oct 25 15:05:21 PST 2000