Speaker: Salah Bazzi, Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Action Lab at Northeastern University Title: Soft Nonholonomic Constraints: Theory and Applications to Optimal Control Abstract: Efficient motion is an important aspect of robotic locomotion. Even for the simplest wheeled robots, an exact description of the fastest paths that the robot can follow is only known in special cases. Moreover, these known optimal solutions are infeasible in practice since they are derived based on kinematic models of the robots. Attempts to find the optimal trajectories for dynamically-extended models...