Description

The objective of the I+D project hosting the candidate is to investigate how energy-efficient and agile robot motions can be planned and executed in an efficient and reliable way. While robot movements are usually rigid and stereotyped, our aim is to make them more graceful or natural. This does not mean to avoid jagged movements by simply smoothing the trajectory, but to adapt each movement to the normal modes of oscillation of the robot parts and manipulated objects, taking advantage of gravity, inertia, and centripetal forces, and thus reducing the internal forces and global effort of the robot.
To achieve this goal, this project will offload lower-level control loops in their task to achieve feasible, conservative motions, transferring part of their duty to a higher-level motion planner that, by considering the full robot dynamics, will be able to achieve natural motions compliant with motor torque, energy storage, or material resistance limitations.

The work is under the scope of the following projects:

• KINODYN: Kinodynamic planning of efficient and agile robot motions (web)