Research

Here you can find information about my current and past research projects.

Humanoid Robot Co-Design: Coupling Hardware Design with Gait Generation via Hybrid Zero Dynamics

62nd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control | Control and Dynamical Systems | Caltech | 2023

In this paper, we propose a method on how to do hardware design and control simultaneously. The proposed method is based on augmenting the original robot model during the HZD gait generation phase in such a way that we can also optimize over hardware parameters such as link lengths during the trajectory optimization. The proposed method was used to design and control the humanoid robot ADAM.

Collaborators: Jeeseop Kim, Maegan Tucker, Aaron D. Ames

Design and Control of a Torque Controllable Quadrupedal Robot - A study on the development of ASTRo

Master Thesis | Cybernetics and Robotics | NTNU | Spring 2021

In this project we developed a torque controllable sprawling quadrupedal robot. The project covered all the phases of developing a robot, such as mechanical design, electronics setup, driver development, software development, creation of a simulation environment in ROS, and the creation of various gait controllers, including a hierarchical whole body controller.

Collaborators: Paal Thorseth

Research Internship - Autonomous Navigation

Internship | Cybernetics and Mathematics | SINTEF Digital | Summer and Fall 2019-2020

My work revolved around making a rover robot capable of autonomously navigating between waypoints provided by an external server and sending state data and other updates back to the server.  The work involved localization, navigation, and computer vision tasks in ROS were I had to make the robot capable of detecting, identifying, and localizing objects in the field and reporting it back to the main server. The work was part of the AFarCloud Project, which was an EU project on smart farming.

Collaborators: N/A

Development and Comparisons of Inertial Navigation Systems For Aircraft Systems

Specialization Project | Cybernetics and Robotics | NTNU | Fall 2020

In this project various navigation systems were investigated, implemented, and their performances compared. The famous Multiplicative Extended Kalman Filter was compared to a simpler navigation system where a attitude heading reference systems was used in cascade with an Extended Kalman Filter to provide full state estimation. The use of different sensors and disturbances were also investigated. The goal of the project was to create a foundation for an advanced navigation system to be used in Arduino based robotic systems. 

Collaborators: N/A

Heat Development in Concrete

UROP | Civil and Environmental Engineering | NTNU | Spring/Summer 2017

In this project we investigated heat development in concret and how it can lead to damages during the construction process. The study was done to create an educational video for undergraduate in the Civil Engineering department taking the class Construction Materials. 

Collaborators: Daniel Markali, Ragnhild Myrnes

Contact:   aghansah@caltech.edu   |   (626) 365-2299