Seminar: Toward Robustly Stable Hands-free Dynamic Walking: Feedback Control Design for an Exoskeleton for Paraplegics

Ayonga Hereid, PhD, The Ohio State University

All dates for this event occur in the past.

Scott Laboratory
Scott Laboratory
Room E525
201 W 19th Ave
Columbus, OH 43210
United States

Abstract

“When the doctors asked what my goals were, I said, walk, ride, rodeo. I got the last two. About that first one, maybe one day,” said Amberley Snyder at the end of the movie “Walk.Ride.Rodeo”, which is based on the true story of Amberley Snyder, a championship rodeo racer who was paralyzed from the waist down after a severe car accident. To be able to walk again is Amberley’s dream, but it is also the goal of more than 100,000 Americans and even more people worldwide who suffer from complete paraplegia or tetraplegia. While building humanoids to send them to Mars still lives in a fantasy world, developing robotics technology to help people like Amberley needs our immediate attention and would drastically benefit our society. In this talk, the speaker will present his lab's efforts of building a fully actuated lower-limb exoskeleton for paraplegic individuals to help them to walk without the use of crutches or other external means of stabilization. The presentation will begin with the design of feedback control method for bipedal robots and then for exoskeletons. The power of modern optimization techniques and control theory are harvested to develop robust feedback control policy that is capable of regulating walking speeds and rejecting disturbances. Preliminary experimental results with complete paraplegic individuals and simulated results of the new machine learning based approach will be discussed.

 

About the speaker

Ayonga Hereid is an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at The Ohio State University, where he leads the Cyberbotics Research Lab. He received his PhD in mechanical engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 2016. His research interest is in control and motion planning for bipedal robots and exoskeletons, with a particular focus on developing optimization-based control solutions for robotic and hybrid dynamical systems. His work in dynamic bipedal locomotion received the DENSO Best Student Paper award at HSCC in 2014 and was nominated for the finalist for the Best Conference Paper award at ICRA in 2016.

 

Hosted by Prof. Manoj Srinivasan.