Feedback Motion Planning with Sums of Squares Verification (w/ applications to legged robots and robotic birds)

Dr. Russ Tedrake, Massachussets Institute of Technology

ABSTRACT

In this talk, I will present a nonlinear feedback control synthesis algorithm which combines randomized motion planning algorithms, popular in robotics, with sums of squares optimization.  In order to drive the system to a goal state, the algorithm systematically populates the controllable subset of state space with a sparse set of trajectories which are locally stabilized with time-varying linear feedback and verified with sums of squares.  Under mild assumptions, the algorithm probabilistically converges to a controller which stabilizes the entire controllable set; in initial experiments this coverage occurs relatively quickly.  By virtue of the randomized planning component, the algorithm has potential for implementation on "hopelessly nonconvex" problems.                              
                                                                                
I will motivate and demonstrate the algorithm by describing some of our work in designing feedback for legged robots that walk on rough terrain and small-scale UAVs that fly like a bird, and land on a perch.

BIO

Russ Tedrake is an Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA), and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab. He received his B.S.E. in Computer Engineering from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1999, his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT in 2004, and was a Postdoctoral Associate in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT before joining the faculty in EECS in 2005. He has received an NSF CAREER award, the MIT Jerome Saltzer award for undergraduate  teaching, the DARPA Young Faculty Award, and was named a Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellow.  The goal of his research is to build robots which exploit their natural dynamics to achieve extraordinary agility and efficiency.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/locomotion/russt.html