Ch. 1 - Fully-actuated vs Underactuated Systems
© Russ Tedrake, 2024 Last modified 2026-10-11. How to cite these notes, use annotations, and give feedback. Note: These are working notes used for a course being taught at MIT. They will be updated throughout the Spring 2024 semester. Lecture videos are available on YouTube. Many robots today move far too conservatively, and accomplish only a fraction of the tasks and achieve a fraction of the performance that they are mechanically capable of. In some cases, we are still fundamentally limited by control technology which matured on rigid robotic arms in structured factory environments, where large actuators could be used to "shape" the dynamics of the machine to achieve precision and repeatability. The study of underactuated robotics focuses on building control systems which instead exploit the natural dynamics of the machines in an attempt to achieve extraordinary performance in terms of speed, efficiency, or robustness. In the last few years, controllers designed using machine learnin