Project description
Bipedal locomotion in robotics gets new drive
Despite significant development of humanoid robotics in the last 15 years, achieving bipedal locomotion in terms of speed and versatility is still beyond our reach. The NatDyReL project aims at a fundamental paradigm shift in the design and control of humanoid robots. This paves the way for a new generation of intrinsically compliant robots that are capable of adjusting their open loop actuator impedance in real-time to the task. Most importantly, the developed methods will allow for their use and adaptation in other morphologies, including multi-limbed walking or climbing robots.
Objective
Despite the significant progress made in the field of humanoid robotics over the last 10-15 years, bipedal locomotion in robotics is still far from human performance in terms of speed, versatility, and robustness. The design of most humanoid robots nowadays is dominated by the aim at high rigidity and position accuracy in the motor units.
In contrast, the NatDyReL project aims at a fundamental shift of paradigm in the design and control of humanoid robots, towards a new generation of intrinsically compliant robots that can adjust their open loop actuator impedance in real-time to the task. We believe that the maturing technology of variable impedance actuators in combination with novel control approaches for the intrinsically elastic dynamics has the potential of bringing humanoid locomotion and multi-contact motions to a new level in terms of energy-efficiency and execution speeds more similar to the human archetype. However, to fully utilize the ultimate benefits promised by variable impedance actuators, i.e. to store and release energy as well as to provide physical protection against shocks caused by impacts, it is necessary to exploit the natural compliant whole body dynamics on all levels of the system design, planning and control hierarchies.
This project follows two scientific tracks for achieving (a) energetically efficient and high performant legged locomotion and (b) robust and dynamic contact transitions and in-contact motions for whole body locomotion in uncertain and confined spaces. As a strong basis to the mentioned application oriented objectives, we also aim at fundamental contributions on the control challenges related to novel variable impedance actuator technologies.
The project is expected to make a strong impact on bipedal humanoid locomotion. Moreover, the developed methods will be sufficiently general such that they can also be transferred to other morphologies such as e.g. multi-limbed walking or climbing robots.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringrobotics
You need to log in or register to use this function
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC-COG - Consolidator GrantHost institution
1040 Wien
Austria