Time: 3-4 pm Eastern Time, Feb 14 (Friday), 2025

Location: MSEE 112

Zoom Link: https://purdue-edu.zoom.us/j/98798335169

Coffee and snacks will be provide.

Autonomous Control of Bio-inspired Extreme Behaviors in Robotics

Abstract: 

Highly agile and extreme behaviors of many biological systems offer examples for future research directions to target similar mobility in bio-inspired robots understanding of the complex dynamics and subsequent design of a robust and adaptive control framework. Examples of extreme behaviors in biological systems are the fast oscillation-driven maneuvers of bees flapping their wings around 200 Hz and the rapid impulsive striking of mantis shrimp releasing their stored potential energy within milliseconds. The challenges for control of robots with similar extreme behaviors lie in the highly nonlinear dynamics operating over multiple timescales. Specifically, one has to account for fast dynamics (extreme motions) and slow dynamics (time- averaged motion or slower drift in the system), and the time-varying actuation model in the high-frequency regime (fast- dynamics) vs the low-frequency regime (slow dynamics). This talk will address the control-theoretic aspects of dealing with such challenges in bio-inspired robots based on first principles in mathematical system theory. The first part of this talk will address the recent progress on controlling the Harvard Robobee, an insect scale flapping-wing vehicle that flaps its wings around 150Hz and a bird scale robot flapping around 20 Hz. In addition, the recent findings in the nonlinear modeling of the dynamic principles of mantis shrimp strike will be covered, which allows the striking speed to reach 27 m/s within a few milliseconds. The bifurcation analysis on the latch-mediated spring actuation system will be covered to find the intrinsic properties of impulsive biological and synthetic systems.

Speaker:

Organizers: Ziran Wang (ziran@purdue.edu), Nak-seung Patrick Hyun (nhyun@purdue.edu), & Yunyue Elita Li (elitali@purdue.edu)