Illuminating the Eighteenth-Century British Stage: Perfecting Performance through Education

Actress studies has become “a truly interdisciplinary field” that “intersect[s] with art, music, literature, history, economics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, and fashion” (Engel 752). While much scholarship has been conducted on the actress’ life, interaction with material culture, public spectacle, authority, femininity, and writings, the role of an actress’ education in her success has yet to be explored adequately or examined beyond biography. My project seeks to examine the educational beginnings of actresses and I assert there are three modes that eighteenth-century actresses often undertook to cultivate their celebrity and success: inheritance, discovery, and trial and error. This project examines the advantages an actress gained through her theatrical education, which participates in the conversation of “thinking about the complexities of actress’ experiences and the variety of strategies they employ to manage their personal and professional lives” (Engel 756)

Using Corpus Linguistics and Language Analysis Tools for ESLVocabulary Instruction: Two Case Studies

Choosing relevant vocabulary to teach in ESL composition courses can be a difficult task for instructors. They often rely on intuition rather than empirical methods for vocabulary selection. This paper presents two case studies where corpora were used either to select vocabulary items for instruction or to scaffold student learning of vocabulary through exposure to corpora. Corpora and language analysis tools were used to complement vocabulary selection and instruction. This vocabulary selection process complements perceptual approaches as it provides empirical measures for the selection and a data driven approach to learning as instructors teach and students learn contextually relevant words

Coupled Control Systems: Periodic Orbit Generation with Application to Quadrupedal Locomotion

A robotic system can be viewed as a collection of lower-dimensional systems that are coupled via reaction forces (Lagrange multipliers) enforcing holonomic constraints. Inspired by this viewpoint, this letter presents a novel formulation for nonlinear control systems that are subject to coupling constraints via virtual “coupling” inputs that abstractly play the role of Lagrange multipliers. The main contribution of this letter is a process—mirroring solving for Lagrange multipliers in robotic systems—wherein we isolate subsystems free of coupling constraints that provably encode the full-order dynamics of the coupled control system from which it was derived. This dimension reduction is leveraged in the formulation of a nonlinear optimization problem for the isolated subsystem that yields periodic orbits for the full-order coupled system. We consider the application of these ideas to robotic systems, which can be decomposed into subsystems. Specifically, we view a quadruped as a coupled control system consisting of two bipedal robots, wherein applying the framework developed allows for gaits (periodic orbits) to be generated for the individual biped yielding a gait for the full-order quadrupedal dynamics. This is demonstrated on a quadrupedal robot through simulation and walking experiments on rough terrains

Verifying Safe Transitions between Dynamic Motion Primitives on Legged Robots

Functional autonomous systems often realize complex tasks by utilizing state machines comprised of discrete primitive behaviors and transitions between these behaviors. This architecture has been widely studied in the context of quasi-static and dynamics-independent systems. However, applications of this concept to dynamical systems are relatively sparse, despite extensive research on individual dynamic primitive behaviors, which we refer to as "motion primitives." This paper formalizes a process to determine dynamic-state aware conditions for transitions between motion primitives in the context of safety. The result is framed as a "motion primitive graph" that can be traversed by standard graph search and planning algorithms to realize functional autonomy. To demonstrate this framework, dynamic motion primitives -- including standing up, walking, and jumping -- and the transitions between these behaviors are experimentally realized on a quadrupedal robot

Coupled Control Systems: Periodic Orbit Generation with Application to Quadrupedal Locomotion

A robotic system can be viewed as a collection of lower-dimensional systems that are coupled via reaction forces (Lagrange multipliers) enforcing holonomic constraints. Inspired by this viewpoint, this letter presents a novel formulation for nonlinear control systems that are subject to coupling constraints via virtual “coupling” inputs that abstractly play the role of Lagrange multipliers. The main contribution of this letter is a process—mirroring solving for Lagrange multipliers in robotic systems—wherein we isolate subsystems free of coupling constraints that provably encode the full-order dynamics of the coupled control system from which it was derived. This dimension reduction is leveraged in the formulation of a nonlinear optimization problem for the isolated subsystem that yields periodic orbits for the full-order coupled system. We consider the application of these ideas to robotic systems, which can be decomposed into subsystems. Specifically, we view a quadruped as a coupled control system consisting of two bipedal robots, wherein applying the framework developed allows for gaits (periodic orbits) to be generated for the individual biped yielding a gait for the full-order quadrupedal dynamics. This is demonstrated on a quadrupedal robot through simulation and walking experiments on rough terrains