Planning and Control

• Motivation: develop a trajectory planning routine for flapping systems, specifically robotic bats
• Created a Lagrangian dynamics model of the bat robot B2
• Developed a trajectory optimization routine with direct collocation for planning flapping flight maneuvers
• Planned launch and banked turn maneuvers
• Implemented launch maneuver on embedded microprocessor and tracked trajectory with PD controller
• Presented this work at the IROS 2019 robotics conference in Macau, China

J. Hoff, U. Syed, A. Ramezani, S. Hutchinson, “Trajectory planning for a bat-like flapping wing robot,” in IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2019.

• Motivation: improve the speed of trajectory planning for flapping systems and reduce dependency on initial guess
• Created a two-stage planning approach for flapping systems
• Stage 1: solve optimization using data-driven fixed-wing approximation
• Stage 2: use stage 1 solution as initial guess, and solve stage 2 with full flapping-wing model
• Improvements: speed of convergence, dependency on the initial guess, and quality of the solution
• Implemented on actual hardware flight experiments

J. Hoff and J. Kim, “Two-stage trajectory optimization for flapping flight with data-driven models,” in IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2021.