The HCR Laboratory
Dreamer Receives a New Arm
Dreamer receives a new 7 Degree of Freedom, Series Elastic Arm manufactured by Meka. A new gripper is being designed to allow dual hand manipulation.
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Trikey Compliant Mobile Base 2012 Completed
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Talk at Dynamic Walking 2012
Dr. Sentis gives a talk at Dynamic Walking 2012 on Rough Terrain Locomotion.
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Slides from Robotics Science and Systems
pdf
UT-SEA: Compact, High Power, Light-Weight, Series Elastic Actuator
UT-SEA is a compact, light-weight, high-power actuator designed to enable energetic and high speed locomotion in electrically actuated legged systems. It uses a ballscrew as the primary speed reduction mechanism resulting in very high operating efficiency. The actuator is mounted on a set of springs which allows it to tolerate impact loads, store energy, and control force with high fidelity.
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ONR, funds our project "HAWK: Hyper-Agile WalKing Controller for Bipedal Robots Aboard Navy Vessels"
Rough Terrain Manipulation Using the Dreamer/Meka Mobile Humanoid
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DARPA Robotics Challenge
Check the news. We are excited!
The New Hume Bipedal Robot
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The new Dreamer/Meka compliant humanoid robot
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Series Elastic Actuator of Hume
Details of the new knee actuator of the bipedal robot Hume.
Illustrations of the Hume Biped for Fast Locomotion in Irregular Terrains
UT Austin's biped robot for fast rough terrain locomotion. The Hume biped will be capable of maneuvering on terrains with height variations between 0-40 [cm] at speeds above 1 [m/s]. It uses SEA actuators with joint velocities above 10 [rad/s] and joint torques above 100 [Nm]. Its overall weight is 15 [Kg] and its overall height is 1.6 [m] thus resembling a mid size person.
The HCRL on YNN TV Channel at Barnes & Noble
Kids in North Austin had a sneak peek at the future Saturday. Saturday, the Barnes & Noble story in the Arboretum hosted Dreamer, an artificially intelligent humanoid robot. Dreamer's brain was programmed by the scientists at UT's Human Centered Robotics Lab. One of those scientists, Dr. Luis Sentis, was on hand to demonstrate what the robot can do. His work deals mostly with force augmentation, which looks into how robots can help to augment the movements of humans. The event had future roboticists in mind. Money from coffee and books sales will go to the Anderson High School Robotics Program.
Stability Analysis to Plan Dynamic Locomotion in Very Rough Terrain, IROS 2011, ISRR 2011
Master's Project: Tricky, Force Controlled Holonomic Base
Master's students, Somudro Gupta (demonstrator) and Pius Wong (video) show their work on design and control of our new holonomic base Tricky. Tricky employs omni wheels set in a triangular configuration to achieve omni-directional force control. It uses three Maxon motors rated at 250W with 3 stage planetary gears and 60 gear ratio providing 18Nm of torque per wheel. To control the torques, we have developed a new amplifier board capable of doing both current and load cell feedback. The board uses a Freescale 8-bit MC9S08MP16 microcontroller to achieve servo rates of 4KHz. The movie shows force interactions between the base and a user, based on servoing torque feedback.
Spotlight on the multi-contact/grasp matrix for the control of compliant legged robots
The HCRL Lab hosts Marc Raibert
We were very happy to hosty Marc. The visit took place on Wednesday Feb 16, 2011.
Dreamer says hello to Willow Garage
These sketches present our current progress in compliant control of humanoid robots at Willow Garage. The idea is to combine torque-based compliant behaviors for Cartesian and joint space tasks. This approach enables to respond quickly to contact, be safe and use effectively the dynamics of the mechanism. The focus of this research is more on the skill than on the single low level control process. We provide infrastructure to bridge the gap between the skill developer (who cares about the mathematics of movement and robot dynamics) and the skill user (who cares about motion / high level planning and perception).
The DREAMER Meka-HCRL Sociable Head Arrives to the Lab
Experiments on prioritized compliant control
This video shows various experiments of the control of UT Austin's humanoid Meka robot. We demonstrate prioritized torque control strategies, addressing hand position tasks and dynamically compensated posture optimization. In particular, the main contribution of the experiments is the ability to optimize posture performance by dynamically compensating the postural mass matrix with the task's null space matrix.
Compliant Control Experiments on the Meka Robot
Collaborative implementation of compliant control with Stanford Univ. and Willow Garage. Three experiments are shown: (a) gravity effort compensation to validate the robot's dynamic and kinematic model, (b) dynamically weighted posture control to demonstrate the validity of the mass/inertia matrix, and (c) operational space compliant control in the vertical and Sagittal directions to demostrate the ability to respond to the environment using the tool.
Testing of Fluidic Muscles
A series of experiments to validate the capabilities of a high force compliant fluidic actuator in terms of tracking bandwidth, stiffness regulation, gravity compensation, and torque control.