VRA: Grounding Discrete-Time Joint Acceleration in Voltage-Constrained Actuation
For robotic systems using electric actuators, this work provides a practical interface to ensure that acceleration commands are physically realizable, improving safety and performance near constraints.
The paper addresses the gap between kinematic acceleration constraints and physically realizable accelerations under voltage-constrained electric actuators. It proposes Voltage-Realizable Acceleration (VRA), which restricts commanded accelerations to voltage-realizable constraints, and demonstrates through hardware experiments that VRA removes unrealizable accelerations, restores consistent near-constraint execution, and reduces constraint-induced oscillations.
Discrete-time joint acceleration constraints are widely used to enforce position and velocity limits. However, under voltage-constrained electric actuators, kinematically admissible accelerations may be physically unrealizable, exposing a missing execution-level abstraction. We propose Voltage-Realizable Acceleration (VRA), a joint-level acceleration interface that grounds kinematic acceleration in voltage-constrained actuator physics by restricting commanded accelerations to voltage-realizable constraints. Hardware experiments on electric actuators and a wheel-legged quadruped show that VRA removes unrealizable accelerations, restores consistent near-constraint execution, and reduces constraint-induced oscillations.