Title:  Balancing on a Knife Edge While Doing Something Else

Speaker:  Roy Featherstone
Contact:  http://royfeatherstone.org

Abstract:

This talk begins with a short movie that presents a variety of results
involving robotic devices that balance themselves actively while also
performing other tasks such as following motion commands.  It continues with a
presentation explaining how some of these results were obtained.  In
particular, it explains how the act of balancing can be regarded as a physical
process and modelled by a simple plant that describes only the balancing
behaviour of the robot, and is therefore the same for all robots that balance
on a point in the vertical plane, which is a line segment (knife edge) in 3D.
A simple feedback controller can be closed around this plant, enabling the
robot to balance.  The presentation also explains how the balance controller
can be combined with an acausal filter to implement the strategy of leaning in
anticipation of the balance disturbances that will be caused by following
motion commands.  The talk concludes with a second short movie that explains
how to combine balancing with absolute motion of the robot's tip expressed in
operational space.