IEEE-CDC Workshop (1/2 Day): Feedback Control of Biped Walking Robots

IEEE-CDC Workshop (1/2 Day): Feedback Control of Biped Walking Robots

December 7, 2003

Organizers: J. W. Grizzle, University of Michigan, and C. Canudas-de-Wit, Laboratoire d'Automatique de Grenoble

Additional Participants: E.R. Westervelt, The Ohio State University, M.W. Spong, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Anton Shiriaev, University of Umea, Sweeden

Summary: Over the past several years, a group of people in the control community have begun to investigate the systematic design of feedback controllers for bipedal robots, with emphasis on careful model formulation and analysis of the stability properties of the closed-loop system. This workshop brought together five of these researchers to present their work in a tutorial fashion to the control community. The first three lectures were centered around RABBIT, a particular planar, underactuated, biped that was specifically designed to advance the fundamental understanding of controlled legged locomotion. The last lecture presented a detailed discussion of the notion of passive walking and its relation to passivity-based and hybrid nonlinear control.

Robots studied in the workshop. Schedule and available on-line material are given below.


(RABBIT)	(Passivity Based Control)

Schedule

8:10 to 8:20 Welcome & Introduction
8:20 to 9:00 Background & Modeling of Planar Bipeds (Grizzle)
9:00 to 10:00 Feedback Control of Rabbit (Westervelt)
10:00 to 10:15 Break
10:15 to 11:05 Dynamic Balancing (Canudas-de-Wit)
11:05 to 11:10 Pause
11:10 to 12:00 Passivity Based Control of 3-D Walking (Spong)

Available Material

Presentations: [Grizzle_Welcome], [Grizzle_Background_and_Modeling], [Westervelt_HZD_Control], [Shiriaev_Canudas_Orbital_Stabilization], [Spong_Passivity_based_Control]
The videos shown by Grizzle and Westervelt are all available here. Various animations by Mark Spong are available here.
MATLAB Code: [Three Link Walker (Morris, Westervelt and Grizzle)], [Five Link Walker (Westervelt and Grizzle)] Copyright (c) 2003 by Eric Westervelt, Ben Morris and Jessy Grizzle. Each of these packages provides complete MATLAB code for deriving the model and controller in symbolic form, converting them to m-files for use in MATLAB, a simulator, plot routines, and an animator. See the "read_me" file in each software package. The code has been tested on a PC running MATLAB 6.5. This code may be freely used for noncommercial ends. If use of this code in part or in whole results in a publication, proper citation must be included in that publication. This code comes with no guarantees nor support.
Eric R. Westervelt's PhD Dissertation is available here; see also, Westervelt's Thesis Documentation Page.
Robotics papers by Grizzle and Westervelt.