Description:

The ultimate objective of my research work in DAIR Lab is to develop safety-critical controllers for balancing of a bipedal robot. The safety-critical controller is formulated as a Sum-Of-Squares (SOS) program. The controller will be tested on the bipedal robot named Cassie developed by Agility Robotics.

Work on Cassie:

• Due to the lack of force sensors on the feet, implemented contact estimation for the feet using Quadratic Programming
• Implemented Contact-Aided Invariant EKF for pose estimation of the pelvis of the bipedal robot in simulation (drake) and on the real robot
• Generated trajectories for walking and standing using reduced-order models and tracked the trajectories using Partial Feedback Linearization

Safety-Critical Controller:

• Formulated a SOS program to find a controller for the reduced-order model along with the region of attraction for the hybrid model.