Professor Nak-seung Patrick Hyun of the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University, USA, has visited CDSL. He delivered a seminar under the title of “Autonomous Control of Extreme Behaviors in Bio-Inspired Robotics”.
In this seminar, prof. Hyun introduced the recent progress in handling the control-theoretic challenges of bio-inspired robots with extreme behaviors. Examples of such extreme behaviors that can be observed in biological systems include the flapping of bee wings at high frequency and the impulsive striking of mantis shrimps.
The main challenge lies in the mathematical modeling of highly nonlinear extreme behaviors. Prof. Hyun utilized the highly dynamical Lagrangian modeling and the nonstandard analysis to capture the extreme behaviors. By implementing various control techniques, such as geometric adaptive control, optimal control, and safety-critical control of multi-agent systems, prof. Hyun successfully developed a hovering robobee with rapidly flapping wings. His future goal is to enable cycling learning between biological systems, mathematical system theory, and robotics.
Throughout the seminar, students of CDSL were able to get familiar with bio-inspired robotics. In particular, prof. Hyun drew a lot of interest from the students by showing his actual experiments on robobess. We expect this seminar to be a starting point of extending the research interests of CDSL to bio-inspired robotics.