Arne Sachtler

Tristan Ehlert, Arne Sachtler, Annika Schmidt et al.

Nature suggests that exploiting the elasticities and natural dynamics of robotic systems could increase their locomotion efficiency. Prior work on elastic snake robots supports this hypothesis, but has not fully exploited the nonlinear dynamic behavior of the systems. Recent advances in eigenmanifold theory enable a better characterization of the natural dynamics in complex nonlinear systems. This letter investigates if and how the nonlinear natural dynamics of a kinematic elastic snake robot can be used to design efficient gaits. Two types of gaits based on natural dynamics are presented and compared to a state-of-the-art approach using dynamics simulations. The results reveal that a gait generated by switching between two nonlinear normal modes does not improve the locomotion efficiency of the robot. In contrast, gaits based on non-brake periodic trajectories (non-brake orbits) are perfectly efficient in the energy-conservative case. Further simulations with friction reveal that, in a more realistic scenario, non-brake orbit gaits achieve higher efficiency compared to the baseline gait on the rigid system. Overall, the investigation offers promising insights into the design of gaits based on natural dynamics, fostering further research.

Alin Albu-Schäffer, Arne Sachtler

Increasing the degrees of freedom of robotic systems makes them more versatile and flexible. This usually renders the system kinematically redundant: the main manipulation or interaction task does not fully determine its joint maneuvers. Additional constraints or objectives are required to solve the under-determined control and planning problems. The state-of-the-art approaches arrange tasks in a hierarchy and decouple lower from higher priority tasks on velocity or torque level using projectors. We develop an approach to redundancy resolution and decoupling on position level by determining subspaces of the configurations space independent of the primary task. We call them \emph{orthogonal foliations} because they are, in a certain sense, orthogonal to the task self-motion manifolds. The approach provides a better insight into the topological properties of robot kinematics and control problems, allowing a global view. A condition for the existence of orthogonal foliations is derived. If the condition is not satisfied, we will still find approximate solutions by numerical optimization. Coordinates can be defined on these orthogonal foliations and can be used as additional task variables for control. We show in simulations that we can control the system without the need for projectors using these coordinates, and we validate the approach experimentally on a 7-DoF robot.