Abstract

Closed loop control usually focuses on the control loop itself. However, in this talk I start from the disturbance acting upon the control loop which ultimately motivates the control loop. In robotics disturbances are important as they represent a distinct feature in the environment the agent needs to act upon for example an obstacle but also a target location such as food. Learning to predict these reduces uncertainty and at the same time builds a model of the environment. I’m going to present different adaptive control strategies from ISO , ICO over CLDL to FCL for behaviour based robots and also biped walking. However, all these encode essentially only one behaviour. In our current research we argue that one can use the concept of disturbances for planning because ultimately they motivate transient control loops. Thus loops with a clearly defined lifetime. This concept can be used to reason about a situation the robot finds itself in where chains of temporary control loops can solve a planning problem and/or reach a target location in the presence of obstacles. All of the above have been implemented on real robots.

The seminar will be held in the LR3A , Department of Engineering, and online (zoom): https://newnham.zoom.us/j/92544958528?pwd=YS9PcGRnbXBOcStBdStNb3E0SHN1UT09