Increasing the Efficiency of Robot Locomotion

Tue, 06 May 2014 11:48:51 -0400

SMR IGERT Associate Dieter Schuldt (Mechanical Engineering) will present his paper "Generation of Limit cycles in Hybrid Systems Consisting of Two Linear Subsystems" this June at the American Controls Conference in Portland, OR. This paper addresses a problem that is inherent in mobile robots, which have to carry their own power supply with them. The capacity of a power supply is directly tied to its size, so a mobile robot needs to move as efficiently as possible in order to minimize the size of the poser supply it has to carry around.

The traditional approach to this problem involves the development of more efficient actuators. Dieter's paper examines an alternative approach, which involves using limit cycles to increase the efficiency of robot locomotion.