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Dr. Thrishantha Nanayakkara is the director of the Morphlab, Dyson School of Design Engineering, Imperial College London. He is also the present speaker of the Imperial Robotics Forum consisting of 44 Robotics Principal Investigators, and one of the three directors of the UK RAS Strategic task group for soft robotics. His research interests are in taking a soft robotics approach to understand the nature of the shared computation between the nervous system and the physical body of biological beings. He has published more than 150 peer reviewed papers in flagship robotics journals and conferences. He is an associate editor of IEEE ICRA, IROS, RAL, Frontiers Mechatronics, and Journal of Robotics and mechatronics.
For more details, please visit: https://www.imperial.ac.uk/morph-lab
Entropy reduction for legged locomotion with morphological features in the leg
Entropy reduction for legged locomotion with morphological features in the leg
Legged locomotion involves punctuated state transitions due to collision forces with the terrain. Uncertainties in these collisions, therefore, makes walking a metastable process with stability conditions determined by uncertain interaction dynamics between the robot and the terrain. Our recent experiments using a mountain goat inspired hoof show that the passive dynamics of the compliant structure help slip reduction without any need for feedback control. This behavior also depends on the stiffness levels and their ratios across joints. We have also found that the angle dependent damping profile found in the human knee joint also helps to reduce the entropy of collision forces and post collision joint angle speed. In this talk, I will show this experimental evidence to suggest that careful design of the physical embodiment of the leg can help to reduce the entropy of states during legged locomotion, so that high level controllers can have better stability margins.
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