Global-Position Tracking Control for Highly Versatile Bipedal Robotic Walking

This project will contribute to the advancement of the national health, security and welfare, by improving capabilities, safety and reliability of bipedal walking robots. Bipedal robots are emerging as a critical technology for a broad range of important applications, such as search and rescue, emergency response, home assistance and health care. This project will address important technological challenges of controlling and tracking robot movements in various surroundings. The resulting highly versatile walking robot will be able to avoid obstacles, such as avoid pedestrians in human-populated environments and falling debris on disaster sites. This project will integrate the research with education and outreach activities for engaging students from diverse groups to participate in robotics and control research. The goal of this project is to advance the knowledge in the control of hybrid systems for achieving highly versatile bipedal robotic walking through reliable global-position tracking control. The research draws upon feedback control theory and hybrid systems to create a systematic method of tracking controller design for general hybrid systems with state-triggered jumps that include bipedal walking robots. To reach the research goal, the following objectives will be pursued: (1) to formulate a new method of reference trajectory modification for solving the intermittent tracking-error divergence issue underlying the trajectory tracking problem of hybrid systems with state-triggered jumps; (2) to extend Lyapunov theory to general hybrid systems with state-trigged jumps for creating a large class of controllers that can provably solve the tracking problem; and (3) to synthesize a control framework that exploits the researched controller design to achieve high versatility simultaneously with provable stability, agility, and energy efficiency for bipedal robotic walking. This project will lay a foundation for the creation of next-generation legged robot systems capable of safe and reliable real-world operations. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.