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Controls and Control Theory Commons

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Clemson University

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Articles 31 - 32 of 32

Full-Text Articles in Controls and Control Theory

Environmental Exploration With Long, Thin Tendril Robots, Or Building Plant Based Robots And Teaching Them How To Feel, Michael Benjamin Wooten May 2022

Environmental Exploration With Long, Thin Tendril Robots, Or Building Plant Based Robots And Teaching Them How To Feel, Michael Benjamin Wooten

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Continuum robots offer unique potential benefits for environmental exploration, notably in using their maneuverability to navigate congested environments. In this dissertation, we show how circumnutation, a motion strategy, commonly employed by plants, can be implemented, and usefully exploited, with continuum robots. We discuss how the kinematics of circumnutation, which combines local backbone growth with periodic backbone bending, can be created using extensible continuum robot hardware. The underlying kinematics are generated by adapting kinematic models of plant growth. We illustrate the effectiveness of that approach with experimental results with a tendril robot exploring a congested environment. However, significant challenges remain in …


Pulse-Coupled Oscillator Networks: Achieving Phase Continuity And Learning Optimal Control In Physical Systems, Timothy Anglea May 2022

Pulse-Coupled Oscillator Networks: Achieving Phase Continuity And Learning Optimal Control In Physical Systems, Timothy Anglea

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In this dissertation, we consider the application of pulse-coupled oscillator theory to real-world, physical networks. When the phase of an oscillator is associated with a physical measure, such as clock timing or robotic heading, discontinuous adjustments of the oscillator's phase is undesirable and potentially disadvantageous. Rather, continuous adjustment of the oscillator phase value is needed over a certain amount of time. To ensure that both synchronization and desynchronization can still be achieved under the constraint of continuous phase value changes, we pursue a novel approach to analyze the generalization of a pulse-coupled oscillator network with a time-varying coupling strength. We …