MMAE Seminar by Nelson Rosa: Developing a Modern Approach to Bipedal Gait Generation

Armour College of Engineering’s Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering will welcome Nelson Rosa, a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Stuttgart in the Institute of Nonlinear Mechanics in Stuttgart, Germany, to present a lecture, “Developing a Modern Approach to Bipedal Gait Generation.”

The virtual seminar will take place on Thursday, February 17, 2022, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. Contact Elena Magnus at magnus@iit.edu for the seminar details and a link to join.

Abstract

A fundamental motion task for biped robots is walking. Yet, there has not been a significant focus on studying a biped's gait space: the set of all gaits (periodic motions) in a biped's space of trajectories. In this talk, Nelson Rosa will discuss how tools from the fields of nonsmooth and nonlinear dynamics, optimization, and numerical continuation methods can be used to better understand a biped's gait space and help advance the state of the art in bipedal gait generation. In particular, Rosa demonstrates how current gait generation techniques can use the equilibria of a biped model as a generic seed value that can generate a continuous family of walking gaits. This improves upon the common approach of randomly sampling the trajectory space for a single walking gait. To show the applicability of these results, equilibria are used to generate gaits for several biped robots, including University of Michigan’s MARLO and Boston Dynamics’ Atlas bipeds.

Biography

Nelson Rosa is a Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Stuttgart in the Institute of Nonlinear Mechanics in Stuttgart, Germany. He received his Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Northwestern University and his B.E. in computer engineering from Dartmouth College. During his time at Northwestern, he led a team of undergraduates in the design and control of a wall-climbing robot as part of the Center for Robotics and Biosystems. The robot has been demoed at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and has appeared in popular press, such as IEEE Spectrum and Popular Mechanics. His broader research interests include hybrid dynamical systems, embedded/computer systems, algorithmic design, and legged locomotion.