History of walking robots
Walking over the decades has been studied in several different ways, each with varying degrees of success and failure.
In the 1870s, Leland Stanford commissioned Eadweard Muybridge to study horse locomotion, resulting in the documentation of movement across 40+ mammals.
By 1893, Lewis A. Rygg patented a pedal-controlled mechanical horse. The 1960s saw GE develop a powerful mechanical quadruped, followed by Marc Raibert's remarkable hopping machines at MIT in the late 1980s. In 1991, Tad McGeer introduced passive walking for bipedal robots using mechanical design alone on inclined planes.
The presentation is split into two parts: the first analyses historical walking methods and their varying success, while the second addresses the gap between current capabilities and real-world deployment covering faster gait generation, dynamic behaviour, and robustness through tools like model predictive control (MPC) and reinforcement learning (RL).
It concludes with original contributions on robust locomotion for custom built quadrupeds
Speaker Bio
Shishir is an Assistant Professor of the Centre for Cyber Physical Systems (CPS) and the Department of Computer Science and Automation (CSA) in IISc Bengaluru.
He received his PhD degree in Mechanical Engineering (2016) from the Georgia Institute of Technology, M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering (2012) from Texas A&M University, and B.Tech. degree in Electrical Engineering (2008) from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka, Surathkal.
He worked as a postdoctoral scholar at the California Institute of Technology in 2017 and as an INSPIRE Faculty from 2018 to 2020. He is currently the PI of the Stochastic Robots Lab at IISc. Shishir began his career in the field of robotics, with a focus on legged robots.
Speaker's LinkedIn
Look forward to seeing you at the event!