The next IPAB workshop will take place 24/10/2019 at 12:45 in room G.03 (pastries will be served). Vladimir Ivan and Guiyang Xin will be speaking.
Speaker: Vladimir Ivan
Title: Loco-manipulation using non-linear programming formulations for industrial applications
Abstract: Industrial applications hint on flexibility and agility alongside productivity, particularly in small and medium enterprises. How does our research address these requirements? In this talk, I'll introduce our integration work on a high-performance omni-directional mobile manipulation platform with integrated whole-body control, real-time collision-free whole-body motion planning, and perception. While these ideas are not novel to the academic community, their integration results a system that can be programmed in a flexible way to implement a variety of manipulation and locomotion tasks. I will talk about practical issue we overcome and lessons learned when using these formulations do build demonstrators for industry driven applications in asset inspection and maintenance.
Speaker: Guiyang Xin
Title: The comparison between semi-analytical and fully optimization-based whole-body controllers for legged robots
Summary: Controller is an essential modul in a robotic system. Since legged robots rely on contact constraints with the environments, controllers for them should track desired trajectories accurately and guarantee physical feasibility as well. Optimization-based controllers for torque controllable legged robots have been developed to deal with inequality physical constraints in recent years. Fully optimization-based controllers totally rely on optimization solver to compute torque commands that satisfy multiple tasks and constraints. In contrast, a semi-analytical whole-body controller is composed of task-space inverse dynamics and a quadratic programming problem subject to inequality constraints. The semi-analytical controller has advantages in terms of computation time and extensible applications. In this talk, I will compare the controllers that have been applied on ANYmal, and share my practical experience.