Time: 3-4 pm Eastern Time, Mar 6 (Friday), 2026

Location: MSEE 112

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

Coffee and snacks will be provide.

Controlling robots that dynamically engage in contact with their environment is a pressing challenge. Whether a legged robot making-and-breaking contact with a floor, or a manipulator grasping objects, contact is everywhere. Unfortunately, the switching of dynamics at contact boundaries makes control difficult. Predictive controllers face non-convex optimization problems when contact is involved. In this talk we overcome this difficulty by applying Koopman operators to subsume the segmented dynamics due to contact changes into a unified, globally-linear model in an embedding space. We show that viscoelastic contact at robot-environment interactions underpins the use of Koopman operators without approximation to control inputs. This methodology enables the convex Model Predictive Control of a legged robot, and the real-time control of a manipulator engaged in dynamic pushing. In this work, we show that our method allows robots to discover elaborate control strategies in real-time over time horizons with multiple contact changes, and the method is applicable to broad fields beyond robotics. It is conjectured that human-like dexterity and intelligence in performing multi-phase, segmented dynamical tasks can be elucidated as a rather simple linear control if the human/machine can learn a globally linear dynamic model with use of effective embeddings. 

H. Harry Asada is Ford Professor of Mechanical Engineering and Director of the Brit and Alex d’Arbeloff Laboratory for Information Systems and Technology in the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge, MA. He specializes in robotics, system dynamics and control, and biomedical engineering. His current research includes Koopman operator theory, assistive robotics for eldercare, supernumerary robotic limbs for assisting astronauts, and multi-cable manipulation. He received Best Paper Awards at the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA) in 1993, 1997, 1999, and 2010, the best application paper award at the 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robotics and Systems (IROS), the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award from the American Control Council in 1985, and other 8 best paper awards of major journals and conferences. He was the recipient of the 2011 Rufus Oldenburger Medal from ASME, the Henry Paynter Outstanding Investigator Award from the ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division in 1998, and the Ruth and Joel Spira Award for Distinguished Teaching from School of Engineering, MIT, in 2011. More recently he received the 2023 Pioneer in Robotics and Automation Award from the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society. He is a fellow of IEEE and ASME.