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MechSE assistant professor Joao Ramos has been awarded a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation. The title of his project is “Telecomotion of humanoid robots via bilateral feedback and intent prediction.” Ramos’s work targets understanding the dynamics that arise in a novel bilateral teleoperation framework to control the locomotion of a humanoid robot. Direct control of locomotion via teleoperation, called telelocomotion, is the fundamental step towards creating robot avatars with human-level motor skills.

“Bilateral telelocomotion is an understudied area that should prove to be a rich source of technical challenges,” Ramos said. “This problem is unique because, unlike conventional teleoperation of robot arms, the humanoid robot must dynamically regulate balance while performing any task.”

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Animals like cheetahs are well known for their extreme speed. Still, their ability to accelerate quickly is orders of magnitude slower than that of creatures, including fleas, froghoppers, mantis shrimps, trap-jaw ants, and click beetles—which are capable of achieving stunningly high accelerations, particularly when hunting or escaping predators. What these all have in common is that their fast movements are not powered directly by muscles. Instead, they use a system of springs and latches.

Current literature already describes this extreme locomotion at the small scale, including earlier work from MechSE Assistant Professor Aimy Wissa. So far, however, it’s limited to kinematics (i.e., position, velocity, and acceleration) or morphology characterization.

With a new CAREER grant (Faculty Early Career Development Program) from the National Science Foundation, Wissa aims to build on a gap in those earlier studies by focusing on measuring and modeling the dynamics, or the forces that enable the springs and latches to cause these ultrafast movements.

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