Exploiting Natural Dynamics in Robot Control

Abstract

This paper presents an approach to robot arm control based on exploiting the dynamical properties of an adaptive oscillator circuit coupled to the joints of an arm. The approach is implemented on a real robot arm, and swings pendulums at their natural frequencies, turns cranks and manipulates slinky toys. These actions are all achieved using the same architecture, without any modeling of the arm or its environment. The simple nature of the oscillators, and the lack of modeling results in a robust and very simple system. 1 Introduction This paper presents an approach to the control of robot arms which exploits the physical coupling of the arm and its environment. Dynamical characteristics of the arm are exploited rather than modeled, allowing a very simple control scheme to exhibit a variety of interesting rhythmic behaviors. The system is implemented on the arms of the humanoid robot Cog [ Brooks and Stein, 1994 ] , which is illustrated in Figure 1. Robot arms are complex systems, wit...