Nonlinear Robotics Control Group (NRCG)

Would you feel confident of approaching and touching a heavy duty production assembly robot in operation? Possibly not…

Our goal is to bring future generations of humans and humanoid robots together, which requires safe interaction of humans with robots. Basic requirements are force and shock compliance to avoid injury to humans, while the robot fulfils ‘control’ tasks, i.e. the handling of a filled coffee cup.

In order to achieve this we pursue research into novel, advanced, robust, nonlinear and adaptive control methods where the practical requirements of robotic systems drive our theoretical interests in control.

Our novel control approaches allow not only for compliance but also for human-like motion, resolving the problem of link redundancy in a human fashion.

Hence, our work has focussed on three different aspects of human / robot interaction: