Despite their abundance in robotics and nature, underactuated systems remain a challenge for control engineering. Trajectory optimization provides a generally applicable solution, however its efficiency strongly depends on the skill of the engineer to frame the problem in an optimizer-friendly way. This paper proposes a procedure that automates such problem reformulation for a class of tasks in which the desired trajectory is specified by a sequence of waypoints. The approach is based on introducing auxiliary optimization variables that represent waypoint activations. To validate the proposed method, a letter drawing task is set up where shapes traced by the tip of a rotary inverted pendulum are visualized using long exposure photography.
@article{arxiv.2003.01554,
title = {Underactuated Waypoint Trajectory Optimization for Light Painting Photography},
author = {Christian Eilers and Jonas Eschmann and Robin Menzenbach and Boris Belousov and Fabio Muratore and Jan Peters},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2003.01554},
year = {2020}
}
Comments
Accepted for ICRA 2020 (International Conference on Robotics and Automation)