Warning:
This page is
provided for historical and archival purposes
only. While the seminar dates are correct, we offer no
guarantee of informational accuracy or link
validity. Contact information for the speakers, hosts and
seminar committee are certainly out of date.
Refreshments at 2:45pm, Talk begins at 3:15pm
Scaife Hall
Abstract
In this talk, we will discuss issues of optimal control and
selection of gaits for a class of nonholonomic locomotion systems that
exhibit group symmetries. We study optimal gaits for the snakeboard,
a
representative example of this class of systems. The use of
Lagrangian
reduction techniques to simplify the optimal control problem will be
discussed, along with a general theoretical framework and an algorithm
to
obtain numerical solutions to this problem. This work employs optimal
control techniques to study the optimality of gaits and issues
involving gait
transitions. The general framework to be described can easily be
applied to other examples of biological and robotic locomotion.
Biographical Information
Jim Ostrowski is an Assistant Professor in the
Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics department at the
University of
Pennsylvania and holds a secondary appointment in the Department of
Computer
and Information Science. His expertise is in nonlinear dynamics and
control,
particularly in the area of the mechanics and control of robotic
locomotion
systems. He has studied a wide variety of systems, including snakes,
paramecia, and most recently, eel-like swimming. He has developed a
geometric formulation of locomotion that has been applied to a diverse
set of
systems, including a novel system he introduced called the snakeboard.
For appointments, please contact the host, Howie Choset: choset+@ri.cmu.edu
The RI Seminar Home Page: www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/~mcm/seminar.html
Email: robsem-list-request@cs.cmu.edu