1. Legged Robot Locomotion

I'm working on algorithm development for locomotion control of bipedal robots.

A. The Humanoid COMAN

COMAN is a humanoid which is 95 cm tall and weighs about 30 kg, built by Italian Institute of Technology. In the Biorobotics Laboratory of EPFL, I have developed control algorithms in C++ for stable locomotion of the robot. Here is a video of the implementation of my algorithms on COMAN:

B. The Bipedal Robot MARLO

MARLO is a Bipedal robot at the University of Michigan, in the lab of Professor Jessy Grizzle. I worked on a simplified model of MARLO, which is a 9 DOF biped with 3 degrees of underactuation. This model has enough degrees of freedom to represent the essence of locomotion problem for MARLO. Below is a simulation of the 9DOF 3D biped. A big advantage of the controllers which I used is that they enable the biped to start walking from rest even though the biped has point feet.

Also, using the 3D LIP (Linear Inverted Pendulum Model) the biped uses a realtime footpositioning algorithm to cancel large perturbations. Below is a simulation of this foot positioning strategy. In my controllers only a few parameters appear: step lengths in the sagittal and frontal planes, pitch angle and knee angles at impact. By adjusting the step lengths and pitch angle, stable walking was achieved for different models of the 9DOF 3D biped with different mass distributions and dimensions. Below you can see a simulation of MARLO's family!

C. The Humanoid Robot Romeo

Romeo is a humanoid robot developed by Aldebaran. It has 31 degrees of freedom (DOF); however, in the model of locomotion for this robot, we use only 12 degrees of freedom which excludes the upper body degrees of freedom (such as DOF of hands and head). Having done the modeling and a few system identification experiments, currently, I am developing stable walking gaits together with an active foot positiong algorithm for this robot.

2. Continumm Mechanics on Manifolds

In my Masters Thesis I worked on the generalizations of Continumm Mechanics from to smooth manifolds. Here you can find a version of a related paper published in the Journal of Elasticity, Springer