Uwe Duert’s scientific contributions

The locomotion of a quadruped robot was examined with the emphasis on the creation, optimization and merging of motions and gaits. A Fourier Series Expansion was performed on the controller commands used in the robot gait. It was found that omitting higher order terms has very little, at times even positive e#ect on the robot's performance yet yields a greatly reduced parameter set describing the motion. The parameter reduction is desirable for creating, optimizing and adapting motions. Furthermore, the acquired frequency space representation allows for simple creation of new motions by merging of existing ones and also for creating transitions from one type of motion to another.

This paper gives a brief overview of the work done in the past year. A detailed description of the entire system used in the competition---including its underlying architecture---can be found at [2]

The GermanTeam is the successor of the Humboldt Heroes who already participated in the Sony Legged Robot League competitions in 1999 and 2000. Because of the strong interest of other German universities, in March 2001, the GermanTeam was founded. It consists of students and researchers of five universities: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Universität Bremen, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Universität Dortmund, and Freie Universität Berlin. However, for the system presented in this document, the Humbold Heroes only had reinforcements from Bremen and Darmstadt. The two other universities will actively participate with the beginning of the winter semester.