Tag: matlab

  • USGS Terrain Elevation for MATLAB

    Recently some friends and I competed in M3 Challenge, a fourteen-hour competition where teams of five develop a model that addresses a specific, real-world problem. The first section of this year’s challenge was evaluating the risk of flooding for five national parks: Acadia, Cape Hatteras, Kenai Fjords, Olympic, and Padre Island. Part of our solution involved running flood…

  • Optimizing Trajectories for the Spring Loaded Inverted Pendulum over Slippery Terrain

    Previously, I’ve written short introductions to numerical trajectory optimization here and here—if you’re unfamiliar with the basics, I recommend you check those out first. This write up expands upon a section of my research paper (which I hope to finish soon) and is meant to be a walkthrough of how to apply numerical trajectory optimization to real-world scenarios. The Problem…

  • Tutorial: Direct Collocation Trajectory Optimization with Matlab

    In the previous tutorial, we focused on single shooting trajectory optimization, which involved time-discretizing the control input and simply integrating the dynamics. The desired end state was then added as a constraint to fmincon. Here, we focus on a different trajectory optimization technique, known as direct collocation. Simultaneous Optimization The core difference between shooting methods…

  • Tutorial: Single Shooting Trajectory Optimization with Matlab

    Numerical methods for trajectory optimization have become increasingly popular for analyzing the motion of bipedal spring-mass walkers, whose complex nonlinear dynamics make analytical solutions often infeasible. When I began looking into trajectory optimization, the number of different methods often obscured some of the basic ideas in the field. This tutorial is meant to provide a simple introduction to trajectory optimization with some example…