A roboticist and postgrad researcher
I work in the control lab at the University of Cambridge, with Fulvio Forni as my Supervisor. I have interests in surgical robotics and passivity based control.
Feel free to get in touch by email, using the button:
...or take a look at my publications below!
Docs link - Github link - Description: This package is one of the products of my PhD and allows for the design, simulation and control of robots using Virtual Mechanism Controllers. It makes it easy to build energy-shaping and damping injection controllers with dynamic extensions, supports plotting/animating, and is capable of realtime control.
Arxiv link - Abtract: Passivity-based control is a cornerstone of control theory and an established design approach in robotics. Its strength is based on the passivity theorem, which provides a powerful interconnection framework for robotics. However, the design of passivity-based controllers and their optimal tuning remain challenging. We propose here an intuitive design approach for fully actuated robots, where the control action is determined by a `virtual-mechanism' as in classical virtual model control. The result is a robot whose controlled behavior can be understood in terms of physics. We achieve optimal tuning by applying algorithmic differentiation to ODE simulations of the rigid body dynamics. Overall, this leads to a flexible design and optimization approach: stability is proven by passivity of the virtual mechanism, while performance is obtained by optimization using algorithmic differentiation.
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Abtract: Most impedance control schemes in robotics implement a desired passive impedance, allowing for stable interaction between the controlled robot and the environment. However, there is little guidance on the selection of the desired impedance. In general, finding the best stiffness and damping parameters is a challenging task. This paper contributes to this problem by connecting impedance control to robust control, with the goal of shaping the robot performances via feedback. We provide a method based on linear matrix inequalities with sparsity constraints to derive impedance controllers that satisfy a H-infinity performance criterion. Our controller guarantees passivity of the controlled robot and local performances near key poses.
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Abtract: Energy based control methods are at the core of modern robotic control algorithms. In this paper we present a general approach to virtual model/mechanism control, which is a powerful design tool to create energy based controllers. We present two novel virtual-mechanisms designed for robotic minimally invasive surgery, which control the position of a surgical instrument while passing through an incision. To these virtual mechanisms we apply the parameter tuning method of Larby and Forni 2022, which optimizes for local performance while ensuring global stability.