02 Fakultät Bau- und Umweltingenieurwissenschaften

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://elib.uni-stuttgart.de/handle/11682/3

Browse

Search Results

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Experimental evaluation and uncertainty quantification for a fractional viscoelastic model of salt concrete
    (2022) Hinze, Matthias; Xiao, Sinan; Schmidt, André; Nowak, Wolfgang
    This study evaluates and analyzes creep testing results on salt concrete of type M2. The concrete is a candidate material for long-lasting structures for sealing underground radioactive waste repository sites. Predicting operational lifetime and security aspects for these structures requires specific constitutive equations to describe the material behavior. Thus, we analyze whether a fractional viscoelastic constitutive law is capable of representing the long-term creep and relaxation processes for M2 concrete. We conduct a creep test to identify the parameters of the fractional model. Moreover, we use the Bayesian inversion method to evaluate the identifiability of the model parameters and the suitability of the experimental setup to yield a reliable prediction of the concrete behavior. Particularly, this Bayesian analysis allows to incorporate expert knowledge as prior information, to account for limited experimental precision and finally to rigorously quantify the post-calibration uncertainty.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Bioinspired preactivation reflex increases robustness of walking on rough terrain
    (2023) Bunz, Elsa K.; Haeufle, Daniel F. B.; Remy, C. David; Schmitt, Syn
    Walking on unknown and rough terrain is challenging for (bipedal) robots, while humans naturally cope with perturbations. Therefore, human strategies serve as an excellent inspiration to improve the robustness of robotic systems. Neuromusculoskeletal (NMS) models provide the necessary interface for the validation and transfer of human control strategies. Reflexes play a crucial part during normal locomotion and especially in the face of perturbations, and provide a simple, transferable, and bio-inspired control scheme. Current reflex-based NMS models are not robust to unexpected perturbations. Therefore, in this work, we propose a bio-inspired improvement of a widely used NMS walking model. In humans, different muscles show an increase in activation in anticipation of the landing at the end of the swing phase. This preactivation is not integrated in the used reflex-based walking model. We integrate this activation by adding an additional feedback loop and show that the landing is adapted and the robustness to unexpected step-down perturbations is markedly improved (from 3 to 10 cm). Scrutinizing the effect, we find that the stabilizing effect is caused by changed knee kinematics. Preactivation, therefore, acts as an accommodation strategy to cope with unexpected step-down perturbations, not requiring any detection of the perturbation. Our results indicate that such preactivation can potentially enable a bipedal system to react adequately to upcoming unexpected perturbations and is hence an effective adaptation of reflexes to cope with rough terrain. Preactivation can be ported to robots by leveraging the reflex-control scheme and improves the robustness to step-down perturbation without the need to detect the perturbation. Alternatively, the stabilizing mechanism can also be added in an anticipatory fashion by applying an additional knee torque to the contralateral knee.