The Human Centered Robotics Group

This video, shows snapshots from several groups at the University of Texas at Austin developing Human-Centered Robotic Technologies. Assistant Professor Luis Sentis describes his work on semi-autonomous humanoid robots for The Office of Naval Research, NASA, and DARPA. Assistant Professor Ashish Deshpande describes his research on robots that attach to the human body for rehabilitation and health assistive applications. Associate Professor Jonathan Dingwell studies physical and sensory impairment using virtual reality and robotic techniques. Finally, Assistant Professor James Sulzer develops robotic technologies for stroke rehabilitation using neuro-feedback of brain activity acquired through MRI scans.

 

In order to make unintentional physical interaction with robots safer for humans, we develop compliant control of an omnidirectional wheeled base using Drive-Torque sensor feedback. The movie below shows a fully holonomic mobile robot system which achieves compliant motion via sensor-based force control, improving over previous pseudo-omnidirectional mobile systems by being fully omnidirectional. It shows compliance and safe interaction in both the mobile system alone and as the base of a wheeled mobile manipulator style system.

 

In this video, showing results from our research funded by the US Office of Naval Research. UT’s Hume bipedal robot executes the trajectories given by a Phase Space Planner. A video of UT’s Phase Space Planner is shown further below.Congratulations to our students Donghyun Kim, Ye Zhao, Gray Thomas and Alan Kwok for their success!

Empirical Phase Space Plan Modifications

 

Multiple Steps

 

The video below shows a simulation of our Phase Space Planner in a very difficult terrain. Because the model has no ankle joints, the locomotion maneuver is highly dynamic.

NASA, the Human Centered Robotics Lab at UT Austin and Texas A&M made it to the DRC Trials. Here Valkyrie manipulates a valve while standing up. Valkyrie is a new bipedal robot that was designed and built from scratch in just 9 months. Although this year we did not have a lot of time to get the hardware and software finalized to fully compete, we are here in the competition for the endgame in 2014.

 

 

In the first video, Valkyrie, aided by a new whole-body compliant control and planning architecture, turns an industrial valve while being assisted by a skilled operator. In the second video, Valkyrie undergoes a series of tests to coordinate her upper and lower body.

A new control architecture that utilizes effectively the force controlled Series Elastic Actuators of Hume is put to use for precision motion tracking under gravity disturbances.

 

“Implementation and stability analysis of prioritized whole-body compliant controllers on a wheeled humanoid robot in uneven terrains”, Springer’s Autonomous Robots, Vol. 35, Nu. 4, pp. 301-319, August 2013.

Click on the image below for a link to the PDF

Bumping into walls

Bumping into humans!