Robotic systems require controllers that can handle the complex dynamics of a robot’s physical interactions with its surrounding environment. Because physical interactions are almost exclusively characterised by energy exchange, RaM is working on fully enabling energy awareness in control systems to improve the assessment of physical interactions. The first step towards this objective was taken with the enablement of energy awareness at the loop-control layer. Development is taken one step further with the work presented in this thesis on integrating energy awareness into sequence control, which is to form the basis for future work on energy awareness at the sequence-control layer and higher control layers.
A prioritised list of generically applicable design and implementation requirements for energy-aware sequence control is composed. Following these requirements, an architectural design and conceptual implementation of the sequence-control layer are presented. The energy-aware sequence control layer consists of 3 components and 2 interfaces: a setpoint generator, energy estimator and passivity layer, and a control interface and energy interface. The system is implemented in simulation and experiments are conducted in which the robot collides with a virtual wall. The results show that energy awareness is successfully integrated in the sequence-control layer and enables collision detection and reaction within 30 ms.
With this project, an architectural basis for energy awareness at the sequence-control layer has been formed on a road towards more autonomous and safer robotic systems. Future work should focus on expanding energy assessment to cover a broader range of physical interactions and on testing the system outside of simulation—on a physical robot.
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