Legged Robots: Learning, Dynamics, and Control

Catalog description

This course focuses on giving students experience with deploying controllers on a complex real-world (legged) robot, and how to debug a complex system that relies not only on software but the hardware details. While the details/knowledge covered are centered around legged robots, the skills are relevant to any robot platform. You will learn how to model and control (largely with learning-based tools) a dynamically unstable system, and transfer the results from simulation to hardware. The course will include hands-on exercises building simple robots to develop physical intuition, and simple model-based analyses to make a strong connection between physics and the hardware design of the robot, and control or the software design. The core of the course is a team-project using reinforcement learning (RL) to control a legged robot.