Overview
Together with cloud technologies and machine learning, robotics is one of the key drivers for industrial transformation and society expects it to tackle the challenges of next generations. How can we feed over 10 billion people by the end of this century? How can we intelligently integrate robotic help for the aging society or for pandemic situation? At the Chair of Applied Mechanics we put our effort into finding answers and paving the way for new application fields of robotic systems. And we put our effort into asking new questions: What are the principles of the human gait and how can we use this information for improved prosthesis design? How can we make our future robotic coworkers safer and how can we increase their efficiency?
The origin of the investigations lies in the fundamental research on legged machines, such as our humanoid robot LOLA, a fully in-house designed and produced humanoid. An elaborated combination of light weight hardware components and efficient software modules allows her to navigate not only in predefined laboratory setups, but also in cluttered and dynamic environments. On LOLA, we develop and evaluate new real-time capable planning and control approaches for stable walking. Promising methods are transferred to other platforms in new fields, like the compensation for the inherent inaccuracies of industrial robots or a bin picking application with a cobot. Apart from industrial use cases, we try to get new biomechanical insights into the human gait and use this information to improve the walking capabilities of LOLA and develop simulation and testing concepts for improved prosthesis design.
Besides numerous scientific journals and conferences, we also provide a publicly available code library which includes generic implementations of the various submodules and algorithms that we use to control our robots (robot kinematics, trajectory interpolation, logging etc.):