Congratulations (Dr.) Traiko Dinev for a successful PhD Defence

Title: Concurrent Design and Motion Planning in Robotics using Differentiable Optimal Control

Congratulations to Traiko Dinev for successfully passing his PhD viva on 5th June 2023. His thesis is entitled 'Concurrent Design and Motion Planning in Robotics using Differentiable Optimal Control'.   

Short lay summary: 

Designing efficient robots is a challenging task. The capabilities of the robot in terms of motions are determined by its design and vice-versa -- what design is best for the task is determined by what task we need the robot to execute.

Concurrent design is the process of finding the best motions and robot designs together. It enables engineers to discover more efficient designs and guides the design process.

In this thesis we present new approaches to concurrent design that are aimed at making the process interactive. The main barrier to interactivity is speed of computation. We propose an approach based on taking derivative information from the motion planner. Our approach leverages the fast computation of motions made available by modern motion planners to enable faster co-design tools.

We demonstrate this by building an interactive tool for co-design of quadruped robots. Our methods achieve similar performance to state-of-the-art in terms of optimality whilst being fast enough to enable interactivity.

Traiko's examiners were:

Dr Nicolas Mansard (LAAS CNRS, External)

Dr Michael Mistry (University of Edinburgh, Internal)