Articulated robot

Marsette Vona - Robotics: Algorithms in Action in the Physical World

• Report rights infringement
• published: 25 Mar 2010
• views: 1024

Robotics: Algorithms in Action in the Physical World Marsette Vona, Ph.D., Assistant Professor at CCIS http://www.ccs.neu.edu/research/gpc Robotics is a multi-disciplinary field studied by many different researchers for different reasons. In this talk I will describe my perspective as a computer scientist: a robot is a physical machine whose state encodes information. This information evolves according the interaction of (1) the geometry and mobility of the machine (kinematics), (2) the laws of physics (dynamics), and (3) motion planning and control algorithms. Such algorithms detect the robot's state via sensors and affect it via actuators, and thus give the robot some authority over its own future. But sensing and actuation typically offer only limited access to the state, which can make motion planning and control particularly challenging. To be successful, these algorithms usually need to work in harmony with the physical kinematics and dynamics. The overall task can even extend to designing a robot with intrinsically tractable physical properties. I will describe past and present work along these lines in several different areas, including * self-reconfiguring robots, where the goal is to build systems that can automatically and arbitrarily change shape * user interface software and hardware for remote operation of robots, in particular for space exploration * compliant climbing and walking robots that achieve high reliability by using control algorithms that exploit their particular kinematics and dynamics. Speaker Bio Professor Vona is an experimental roboticist who examines how computation interacts with the physical world. His recent work has involved algorithms for the simulation and control of articulated, and sometimes self-reconfiguring, robots; mechanisms and algorithms that exploit compliant actuation for reliable climbing and walking; and hardware and software for remote operation of Lunar robots. Professor Vona received his MS and PhD degrees in electrical engineering and computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. While pursuing his PhD, he spent two years at NASAs Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, where he was involved in creating the science operations software for the Mars Exploration Rovers Spirit and Opportunity. Professor Vona earned the 2004 NASA Software of the Year Award for this work.