Henrique Manuel Martins Ferrolho
My PhD research focuses on legged robots and the specific challenges associated with these platforms, e.g., robust stability, multi-contact planning. Preliminary work carried out in the early stages of my research concentrated on the offline encoding of robot kinematic capabilities with the purpose of planning whole-body configurations for a bimanual grasping target — a problem known as end-pose planning — see Figure 1. Robustness with regard to stability over unstructured environments with inclined support regions is paramount for such successful planning results.
with NASA's Valkyrie humanoid robot.
with Edinburgh's ANYmal quadruped robot. [4]
Later, I came to realise that the use of high-dimensional geometric representations can be exploited for the encoding of both internal and external constraints imposed on the system [1], [2], [3]. These specific abstractions and representations are powerful tools to enable other higher-level planning methods like end-pose planning or Center of Mass (CoM) Trajectory Optimization (TO) — see Figure 2. My goal is to investigate ways of encoding dynamic internal constraints (e.g., dynamic torque boundaries of the actuators along the kinematic chain of a robot) and external constraints (e.g. environment obstacles, terrain topology and friction) to enable fast computation of the feasible states for any given system. With such representations available, we should get closer to solving problems such as (i) devising a trajectory over unstructured terrain while maximizing robustness to external disturbances, and (ii) plan motions and environment interactions with robots which have sustained injury or faulty actuation hardware to still complete a task successfully.
An up-to-date list of my research output should be available in one of the following external websites:
I am a PhD student under the supervision of Prof. Sethu Vijayakumar at the Edinburgh Centre for Robotics. I graduated from the Faculty of Engineering of the University of Porto, where I attended the BSc./MSc. in Informatics and Computing Engineering.
