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From: cohenb@slc.com (Bruce Cohen)
Subject: Re: Make a BattleMech Stand Up!
In-Reply-To: park@netcom.com's message of Mon, 10 Oct 1994 21:51:14 GMT
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Date: 14 Oct 1994 19:51:52 GMT
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai.neural-nets:19469 comp.ai.alife:1136

In article <parkCxH8pF.J7D@netcom.com> park@netcom.com (Bill Park) writes:

>>    For my Ph. D. thesis in control systems engineering some years ago, I
>>    simulated a four-legged walking robot and its on-board control system.
>>    I developed algorithms for the controller that successfully allowed it
>>    to keep its balance, walk over irregular terrain blind, maintain its
>>    balance on a slippery hill, hobble along with one leg broken, and
>>    automatically change gates as it walked at different speeds.  It would
>>    trip and fall if you gave it too difficult a problem to solve.

Could you please provide a citation for the thesis?  I've occasionally
spent some idle minutes playing with the design of a one-passenger
4-legged walking vehicle, and it's clear to me that most of the gait
control needs to be automatic, more exactly it needs to operate like a
fly-by-wire autopilot in that it's controlled by changing its
high-level goals, not its low-level parameters.  I'd be curious to see
if your algorithms would fit in such a system.


-- 
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No object should exist that doesn't pay for itself by accepting computational
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Bruce Cohen, Servio Corporation                  |   email:  cohenb@slc.com
15400 NW Greenbrier Pkwy, Suite 280              |   phone: (503)690-3602
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