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Imagine that you are at the natural history museum. You wander around and take a look at different parts of the museum. Suddenly, a robot in the form of a long extinct species – the Dodo – moves towards you, starts talking to you and tells you about itself. This course covers constructing an autonomous, intelligent, walking, Dodo-like robot, which requires a combination of a wide spectrum of fields, including design, control, navigation, locomotion, perception and AI. During this laboratory course, the students will develop the necessary skills to design and construct various components of “Robo-Dodo”, as part of a long-term, iterative project.
The ”Simulation & Control” course will focus on the fundamentals of modeling, simulation and control of bipedal walking robots. After some introductory classes, a practical phase will follow in which the students work closely together in interdisciplinary groups. The introductory sessions are structured as follows: In the first part, the necessary theory is taught. Then, a live programming session follows in which the theory is applied in practice. The following topics are covered:
Simulation:
• Floating-base kinematics and dynamics
• Contact modeling
o Event-driven
o Time-stepping methods (Stewart & Trinkle)
Control:
• Reduced-order models (templates)
• Spring-Loaded Inverted Pendulum (SLIP) and derivations
• Passive dynamic locomotion
• Limit Cycles, Poincaré map analysis, stability
• Optimal control methods
• Contact-implicit optimal control

We expect that the student is familiar with basic robot modeling (kinematics and dynamics) and programming (Matlab).

- Introductory classes
- Independent student work
- Team work (including supervised and unsupervised work in the laboratory)