Meeting Abstract
In nature, maneuverability is essential to survival, however, the mechanics of high speed motions such as accelerating, turning and braking are still poorly understood, and have yet to be comparably performed in the field of robotics. Rapid deceleration in particular has received little research attention despite being paramount to the safety of fast animals and robots alike. The ground interactions involved in deceleration are of special interest as they create a difficult trade-off: on the one hand, large braking forces lead to more rapid gait termination, but on the other, they create large destabilizing torques and potentially injury-causing reaction forces in the joints. In this study, extensive, large-scale trajectory optimization of high-speed gait termination in a 12 degree-of-freedom humanoid model is used to gain insight into this trade-off for surfaces of varying friction. These observations are then incorporated into a rapid deceleration template which will be used in future studies to implement the maneuver on a robotic platform.
