In order to strengthen our dedicated team in the Robotics Innovation Center (RIC) research department in Bremen we are looking for a  

Master Thesis/Internship 

(full-time/part-time, 3 – 9 months) 

“Modelling Leg Flexibilities in a Series-Parallel Humanoid Robot”

The Robotics Innovation Center research department, headed by Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Kirchner, develop robot systems that are used for complex tasks on land, under water, in the air, and in space. The recently established underactuated lab at DFKI-RIC is looking for outstanding students to join us in pushing the boundaries of highly dynamic and agile robots.

Topic:

Mobile legged robots rely on state estimation algorithms to determine the robot position and orientation in the world reference frame. Leg odometry plays an important role in state estimation, providing drift-free estimations of the robot floating base to correct the IMU-based estimation. However, leg odometry can be affected by unmodelled flexibilities of the robot legs caused by mechanical structure deformations, actuator compliance, and mass distribution uncertainties. The goal of this thesis is to model the leg flexibilities of the series-parallel humanoid robot RH5. To achieve this goal, the robot kinematics, inertial measurement unit (IMU) and a marker-based motion capture system will be employed. The leg compliance model will be evaluated on the humanoid robot RH5 executing legged motions such as dynamic walking at various speeds.

Prior Knowledge:

lMathematical: linear algebra, basic control theory.

lProgramming: C/C++, Python, Git, ROS / RoCK, ideally experience with robotic simulation softwares (e.g. Raisim, Pybullet etc).

Related Work:

1)G. Romualdi, N. A. Villa, S. Dafarra, D. Pucci and O. Stasse, "Whole-Body Control and Estimation of Humanoid Robots with Link Flexibility," 2022 IEEE-RAS 21st International Conference on Humanoid Robots (Humanoids), Ginowan, Japan, 2022, pp. 104-111, doi: 10.1109/Humanoids53995.2022.10000157.

2)Benallegue, Mehdi & Lamiraux, Florent. (2015). Estimation and Stabilization of Humanoid Flexibility Deformation Using Only Inertial Measurement Units and Contact Information. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics. 12. 1550025. 10.1142/S0219843615500255.

Please contact Mihaela Popescu (Phone: +49 421 17845 4141) for further information and send your application via E-Mail to Mihaela.Popescu@dfki.de.