Optimizing energy consumption for legged robot by adapting equilibrium position and stiffness of a parallel torsion spring

This paper is dedicated to the development of a novel adaptive torsion spring mechanism for optimizing energy consumption in legged robots. By adjusting the equilibrium position and stiffness of the spring, the system improves energy efficiency during cyclic movements, such as walking and jumping. The adaptive compliance mechanism, consisting of a torsion spring combined with a worm gear driven by a servo actuator, compensates for motion-induced torque and reduces motor load. Simulation results demonstrate a significant reduction in power consumption, highlighting the effectiveness of this approach in enhancing robotic locomotion.

A comment on stabilizing reinforcement learning

This is a short comment on the paper "Asymptotically Stable Adaptive-Optimal Control Algorithm With Saturating Actuators and Relaxed Persistence of Excitation" by Vamvoudakis et al. The question of stability of reinforcement learning (RL) agents remains hard and the said work suggested an on-policy approach with a suitable stability property using a technique from adaptive control - a robustifying term to be added to the action. However, there is an issue with this approach to stabilizing RL, which we will explain in this note. Furthermore, Vamvoudakis et al. seems to have made a fallacious assumption on the Hamiltonian under a generic policy. To provide a positive result, we will not only indicate this mistake, but show critic neural network weight convergence under a stochastic, continuous-time environment, provided certain conditions on the behavior policy hold.

RoboKit-MV: an Educational Initiative

In this paper, we present a robot model and code base for affordable education in the field of humanoid robotics. We give an overview of the software and hardware of a robot that won several competitions with the team RoboKit in 2019-2021, provide analysis of the contemporary market of education in robotics, and highlight the reasoning beyond certain design solutions.

Starkit: RoboCup Humanoid KidSize 2021 Worldwide Champion Team Paper

This article is devoted to the features that were under development between RoboCup 2019 Sydney and RoboCup 2021 Worldwide. These features include vision-related matters, such as detection and localization, mechanical and algorithmic novelties. Since the competition was held virtually, the simulation-specific features are also considered in the article. We give an overview of the approaches that were tried out along with the analysis of their preconditions, perspectives and the evaluation of their performance.