Aaron Ames
Caltech

February 14, 2020
Science fiction has long promised a world of robotic possibilities: from humanoid robots in the home, to wearable robotic devices that restore and augment human capabilities, to swarms of autonomous robotic systems forming the backbone of the cities of the future, to robots enabling exploration of the cosmos. With the goal of ultimately achieving these capabilities on robotic systems, this talk will present a unified nonlinear control framework for realizing dynamic behaviors in an efficient, provably stable (via control Lyapunov functions) and safetycritical fashion (as guaranteed by control barrier functions). The application of these ideas will be demonstrated experimentally on a wide variety of robotic systems, including multirobot systems with guaranteed safe behavior, bipedal and humanoid robots capable of achieving dynamic walking and running behaviors that display the hallmarks of natural human locomotion, and robotic assistive devices (including prostheses and exoskeletons) aimed at restoring mobility. The ideas presented will be framed in the broader context of seeking autonomy on robotic systems with the goal of getting robots into the realworld.

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