Capture Point Control in Thruster-Assisted Bipedal Locomotion

Despite major advancements in control design that are robust to unplanned disturbances, bipedal robots are still susceptible to falling over and struggle to negotiate rough terrains. By utilizing thrusters in our bipedal robot, we can perform additional posture manipulation and expand the modes of locomotion to enhance the robot's stability and ability to negotiate rough and difficult-to-navigate terrains. In this paper, we present our efforts in designing a controller based on capture point control for our thruster-assisted walking model named Harpy and explore its control design possibilities. While capture point control based on centroidal models for bipedal systems has been extensively studied, the incorporation of external forces that can influence the dynamics of linear inverted pendulum models, often used in capture point-based works, has not been explored before. The inclusion of these external forces can lead to interesting interpretations of locomotion, such as virtual buoyancy studied in aquatic-legged locomotion. This paper outlines the dynamical model of our robot, the capture point method we use to assist the upper body stabilization, and the simulation work done to show the controller's feasibility.

Banking Turn of High-DOF Dynamic Morphing Wing Flight by Shifting Structure Response Using Optimization

The 3D flight control of a flapping wing robot is a very challenging problem. The robot stabilizes and controls its pose through the aerodynamic forces acting on the wing membrane which has complex dynamics and it is difficult to develop a control method to interact with such a complex system. Bats, in particular, are capable of performing highly agile aerial maneuvers such as tight banking and bounding flight solely using their highly flexible wings. In this work, we develop a control method for a bio-inspired bat robot, the Aerobat, using small low-powered actuators to manipulate the flapping gait and the resulting aerodynamic forces. We implemented a controller based on collocation approach to track a desired roll and perform a banking maneuver to be used in a trajectory tracking controller. This controller is implemented in a simulation to show its performance and feasibility.