SPEAKER: Hi.
Welcome to Unceractuated Robotics.
Underactuated Robotics is the science
of building robots that reason about
and exploit their dynamics to make
them more efficiently, more gracefully,
more aggressively through the world.
The class is going to take a very
computational approach to the problem.
That's because I believe that as the
robots are getting more complicated,
and the environments
that they're operating in
are getting more complicated, that
actually algorithms will succeed,
even when our ability to design a
control system with a pencil and paper
will fail.
We're going to see examples from very
simple mathematical models of robots.
From walking robots, hopping
robots, basic manipulation,
and basic flying robots.
These simple models are easy for
us to understand analytically.
But we're also going to see examples
of the same algorithms applied
to very complex robots
on our research robots
here at MIT, including walking
robots, a quadruped robot that
can walk over rough terrain, a humanoid
robot that can perform manipulation
tasks, even an airplane
that can land on a perch.
The problem sets are going to force
you to write some of the algorithms
yourself.
But we're also going to give you a
fairly substantial open source software
distribution, which has relatively
mature implementations on most
of these algorithms.
So you can apply the best
versions of these algorithms
that we have to your robots right
away, if you have them at home.
So I hope you decide to take the course.
We're looking forward to a fun term.
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