Developer - Autonomous Agents Laboratory
Chris Iverach-Brereton
youtube.com/ve4cib
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https://youtu.be/ltNx70_r3hA
Our New Project
Published on Jan 29, 2015
Quote:
Jennifer, the world's first ice hockey playing humanoid robot, tries out a new winter sport: cross-country skiing.
This is just a short preview of our new skiing project. More videos coming soon!
https://youtu.be/3jesBT-xp1A
Jennifer goes cross-country and alpine skiing
Published on Jan 30, 2015
Quote:
Jennifer, the world's first ice hockey playing humanoid robot takes to the slops and tries out cross-country and alpine skiing in our application for the 2015 DARwIn-OP Humanoid Application Challenge.
The cross-country skiing gait is based on the linear inverted pendulum model and is inspired by walking and ice skating gaits developed for the DARwIn-OP robot.
We have only begun studying alpine skiing, but have demonstrated rudimentary braking and arcing using simple control of the skis' edges.
Improving the control of the alpine skiing is our primary focus, with improving the cross-country gait and allowing the robot to dynamically switch from cross-country to alpine skiing when it detects a change in inclination corresponding to a hill.
Filmed outdoors at the University of Manitoba over several days (with wildly different temperatures and snow conditions).
https://youtu.be/NxDfWx_4ywc
Active balancing for Alpine skiing
Published on Feb 6, 2015
Quote:
Our early experiments, shown in our application video for the 2015 ICRA DARwIn-OP Humanoid Application Challenge, used mainly static, pre-programmed motions. These experiments were intended to see if the robot's skis would work at all for simple gliding, steering, and braking tasks. Unfortunately static motions are limited in their abilities and cannot be easily adjusted for different circumstances.
The solution was to develop software to allow the robot to actively control the angles of its skis, ensuring that the skis remain in contact with the hill, but also keeping the robot's torso upright to prevent falling over.
The development of active balancing software paves the way for our next challenge: actively controlling the robot's steering, letting it carve left and right as it goes down the hill.
https://youtu.be/XU17sbItYxI
Jennifer Darwin carves the slopes
Published on May 28, 2015
Quote:
Jennifer -- the world's first ice hockey playing humanoid robot and winner of the 2012 ICRA Humanoids Application Challenge -- takes to the slopes to demonstrate cross-country and alpine skiing.
The robot actively balances and compensates for small disturbances in the slope by using PID controllers to control the inclination of the centre-of-mass in both the left-right and front-back directions. Turning and braking are accomplished through ZMP control.
We use coloured markers to indicate the course; the robot is programmed to stay inside the region marked by the blue and pink flags.
Cross-country skiing uses a heavily-modified walking gait inspired by our previous work on ice skating in 2012. By lengthening the stride, lowering the vertical amplitude, and increasing the period time we were able to develop a gait that allowed the robot to move across natural snow.
This video was part of our presentation at the 2015 ICRA Humanoids Application Challenge.
This research was done by a team of students from the University of Manitoba's Autonomous Agents Laboratory.