Jingang Yi
Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Rutgers University
Learning-based Modeling and Control of Underactuated Balance Robots
Friday, November 15
10:00am – 11:00AM
Santa Catalina 151
Abstract
Underactuated balance robots have more degrees of freedom than the number of control inputs and many of these robotic systems perform the balancing and tracking tasks simultaneously, such as rotational inverted pendulums, bicycles and bipedal walkers, etc. The balancing task requires the robot to maintain its balance around unstable equilibrium points, while the tracking task requires following desired trajectories. In this talk, I first introduce a framework that integrates the physical-based robotic model with the learning-based latent manifold model for high-dimensional, human-in-the-loop underactuated balance robots. Human-bikebot interaction is used as an example to demonstrate the proposed modeling approach. I then discuss the relationship between the learning-based model and the physical-based model for underactuated balance robotic dynamics such as human walking locomotion. In the last part of this talk, I will introduce the balance equilibrium manifold concept to design a learning model-based control for underactuated balance robots. The system dynamics model is estimated through learning without need of prior physical knowledge nor successful balance demonstrations. Experiments from a Furuta pendulum and a bikebot are used to demonstrate the performance of the learning-based control design.
Bio
Professor Jingang Yi received the B.S. degree in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University in 1993, the M.Eng. degree in precision instruments from Tsinghua University in 1996, and the M.A. degree in mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in mechanical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley, in 2001 and 2002, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor in mechanical engineering and a Graduate Faculty member in electrical and computer engineering at Rutgers University. His research interests include human-robot interactions and assistive robotics, autonomous robotic and vehicle systems, dynamic systems and control, mechatronics, automation science and engineering, with applications to biomedical, transportation and civil infrastructure systems. Prof. Yi is a Fellow of American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME) and a Senior Member of IEEE. He has received several awards, including the 2017 Rutgers Chancellor’s Scholars, 2017 Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Invitational Fellowship for Research, 2014 ASCE Charles Pankow Award for Innovation, the 2013 Rutgers Board of Trustees Research Fellowship for Scholarly Excellence, and the 2010 NSF CAREER Award. He has coauthored several best papers in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering and at IEEE/ASME AIM, ASME DSCC, and IEEE ICRA, etc. He currently serves as a Senior Editor for IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters and an Associate Editor for IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, IFAC journal Mechatronics, and International Journal of Intelligent Robotics and Applications. He also served as an Associate Editor for IFAC journal Control Engineering Practice (2013-2017), IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters (2017-2019), and ASME Journal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement and Control (2014-2018).