The University of Western Australia
|
Name |
UWA Department |
Discipline areas |
|
Prof. Thomas Braunl |
Electrical & Electronic Engineering |
Microcontroller design and fabrication |
|
Dr Kevin Judd |
Mathematics & Statistics |
Applied dynamics and optimisation |
|
Dr Nathan Scott |
Mechanical & Materials Engineering |
Mechanical design |
Andrew McCandless, an honours student in Mechanical Engineering, designed and built an advanced mobile platform with spring-damper independant suspension, elastomer/delrin sub-wheel roller and hub-mounted integral motors. This platform will be used in Prof. Braunl's research effort towards the robot soccer championships.
In April 2001 we applied for ARC funding to build a new bipedal walking robot. Many people I have spoken to believe that this technology is already well established and they are surprised that another project is necessary. Some of the walking robots you may have seen on the television are superbly designed from a mechanical point of view, but generally they are not able to walk in an unstructured environment. They tend to execute pre-calculated motions and will fall over if an obstruction is put in the way.
The goal of our proposed research is to implement a P-Chain Targetting control strategy. This new approach, developed by Dr Kevin Judd, has the robot explore its own body kinematics and kinetics by a series of "experiments". Essentially the robot is made to flop around on the floor while it learns about itself and its environment. The control algorithm records the effect of each actuator on the many state variables of the robot. For example a certain actuator might cause the robot's knee to jerk. The effect of that actuator, however, is determined by the overall state of all the robot's variables. Kicking the lower leg while lying horizontally has a different effect when one is standing.
We are doing what we can to explore the validity of the P-Chain Targetting approach using simpler robots. We are building a simple tetrahedral robot with a small number of degrees of freedom as a platform to test some of the ideas.