Abstract: The purpose of this study is to find natural gait of
biped robot such as human being by analyzing the COG (Center Of
Gravity) trajectory of human being's gait. It is discovered that human
beings gait naturally maintain the stability and use the minimum
energy. This paper intends to find the natural gait pattern of biped
robot using the minimum energy as well as maintaining the stability by
analyzing the human's gait pattern that is measured from gait image on
the sagittal plane and COG trajectory on the frontal plane. It is not
possible to apply the torques of human's articulation to those of biped
robot's because they have different degrees of freedom. Nonetheless,
human and 5-link biped robots are similar in kinematics. For this, we
generate gait pattern of the 5-link biped robot by using the GA
algorithm of adaptation gait pattern which utilize the human's ZMP
(Zero Moment Point) and torque of all articulation that are measured
from human's gait pattern. The algorithm proposed creates biped
robot's fluent gait pattern as that of human being's and to minimize
energy consumption because the gait pattern of the 5-link biped robot
model is modeled after consideration about the torque of human's each
articulation on the sagittal plane and ZMP trajectory on the frontal
plane. This paper demonstrate that the algorithm proposed is superior
by evaluating 2 kinds of the 5-link biped robot applied to each gait
patterns generated both in the general way using inverse kinematics
and in the special way in which by considering visuality and
efficiency.
Abstract: In its attempt to offer new ways into autonomy for a
large population of disabled people, assistive technology has largely
been inspired by robotics engineering. Recent human-like robots
carry new hopes that it seems to us necessary to analyze by means of
a specific theory of anthropomorphism. We propose to distinguish a
functional anthropomorphism which is the one of actual wheelchairs
from a structural anthropomorphism based on a mimicking of human
physiological systems. If functional anthropomorphism offers the
main advantage of eliminating the physiological systems
interdependence issue, the highly link between the robot for disabled
people and their human-built environment would lead to privilege in
the future the anthropomorphic structural way. In this future
framework, we highlight a general interdependence principle : any
partial or local structural anthropomorphism generates new
anthropomorphic needs due to the physiological systems
interdependency, whose effects can be evaluated by means of
specific anthropomorphic criterions derived from a set theory-based
approach of physiological systems.
Abstract: this paper presents a novel neural network controller
with composite adaptation low to improve the trajectory tracking
problems of biped robots comparing with classical controller. The
biped model has 5_link and 6 degrees of freedom and actuated by
Plated Pneumatic Artificial Muscle, which have a very high power to
weight ratio and it has large stoke compared to similar actuators. The
proposed controller employ a stable neural network in to approximate
unknown nonlinear functions in the robot dynamics, thereby
overcoming some limitation of conventional controllers such as PD
or adaptive controllers and guarantee good performance. This NN
controller significantly improve the accuracy requirements by
retraining the basic PD/PID loop, but adding an inner adaptive loop
that allows the controller to learn unknown parameters such as
friction coefficient, therefore improving tracking accuracy.
Simulation results plus graphical simulation in virtual reality show
that NN controller tracking performance is considerably better than
PD controller tracking performance.
Abstract: The amplitude response of infrared (IR) sensors
depends on the reflectance properties of the target. Therefore, in
order to use IR sensor for measuring distances accurately, prior
knowledge of the surface must be known. This paper describes the
Phong Illumination Model for determining the properties of a surface
and subsequently calculating the distance to the surface. The angular
position of the IR sensor is computed as normal to the surface for
simplifying the calculation. Ultrasonic (US) sensor can provide the
initial information on distance to obtain the parameters for this
method. In addition, the experimental results obtained by using
LabView are discussed. More care should be taken when placing the
objects from the sensors during acquiring data since the small change
in angle could show very different distance than the actual one.
Since stereo camera vision systems do not perform well under some
environmental conditions such as plain wall, glass surfaces, or poor
lighting conditions, the IR and US sensors can be used additionally to
improve the overall vision systems of mobile robots.
Abstract: This paper describes the development of an
autonomous robot for painting the interior walls of buildings. The
robot consists of a painting arm with an end effector roller that scans
the walls vertically and a mobile platform to give horizontal feed to
paint the whole area of the wall. The painting arm has a planar twolink
mechanism with two joints. Joints are driven from a stepping
motor through a ball screw-nut mechanism. Four ultrasonic sensors
are attached to the mobile platform and used to maintain a certain
distance from the facing wall and to avoid collision with side walls.
When settled on adjusted distance from the wall, the controller starts
the painting process autonomously. Simplicity, relatively low weight
and short painting time were considered in our design. Different
modules constituting the robot have been separately tested then
integrated. Experiments have shown successfulness of the robot in its
intended tasks.
Abstract: Omni directional mobile robots have been popularly
employed in several applications especially in soccer player robots
considered in Robocup competitions. However, Omni directional
navigation system, Omni-vision system and solenoid kicking
mechanism in such mobile robots have not ever been combined. This
situation brings the idea of a robot with no head direction into
existence, a comprehensive Omni directional mobile robot. Such a
robot can respond more quickly and it would be capable for more
sophisticated behaviors with multi-sensor data fusion algorithm for
global localization base on the data fusion. This paper has tried to
focus on the research improvements in the mechanical, electrical and
software design of the robots of team ADRO Iran. The main
improvements are the world model, the new strategy framework,
mechanical structure, Omni-vision sensor for object detection, robot
path planning, active ball handling mechanism and the new kicker
design, , and other subjects related to mobile robot
Abstract: In recent years a number of applications with multirobot
systems (MRS) is growing in various areas. But their design
is in practice often difficult and algorithms are proposed for the
theoretical background and do not consider errors and noise in real
conditions, so they are not usable in real environment. These errors
are visible also in task of target localization enough, when robots
try to find and estimate the position of the target by the sensors.
Localization of target is possible also with one robot but as it was
examined target finding and localization with group of mobile robots
can estimate the target position more accurately and faster. The
accuracy of target position estimation is made by cooperation of
MRS and particle filtering. Advantage of usage the MRS with particle
filtering was tested on task of fixed target localization by group of
mobile robots.
Abstract: This paper proposes a solution to the motion planning
and control problem of car-like mobile robots which is required to
move safely to a designated target in a priori known workspace
cluttered with swarm of boids exhibiting collective emergent
behaviors. A generalized algorithm for target convergence and
swarm avoidance is proposed that will work for any number of
swarms. The control laws proposed in this paper also ensures
practical stability of the system. The effectiveness of the proposed
control laws are demonstrated via computer simulations of an
emergent behavior.
Abstract: This paper presents the application of Intelligent
Techniques to the various duties of Intelligent Condition Monitoring
Systems (ICMS) for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Robots. These
Systems are intended to support these Intelligent Robots in the event
of a Fault occurrence. Neural Networks are used for Diagnosis, whilst
Fuzzy Logic is intended for Prognosis and Remedy. The ultimate
goals of ICMS are to save large losses in financial cost, time and
data.
Abstract: Stair climbing is one of critical issues for field robots to
widen applicable areas. This paper presents optimal design on
kinematic parameters of a new robotic platform for stair climbing. The
robotic platform climbs various stairs by body flip locomotion with
caterpillar type main platform. Kinematic parameters such as platform
length, platform height, and caterpillar rotation speed are optimized to
maximize stair climbing stability. Three types of stairs are used to
simulate typical user conditions. The optimal design process is
conducted based on Taguchi methodology, and resulting parameters
with optimized objective function are presented. In near future, a
prototype is assembled for real environment testing.
Abstract: To explore pipelines is one of various bio-mimetic
robot applications. The robot may work in common buildings such as
between ceilings and ducts, in addition to complicated and massive
pipeline systems of large industrial plants. The bio-mimetic robot finds
any troubled area or malfunction and then reports its data. Importantly,
it can not only prepare for but also react to any abnormal routes in the
pipeline. The pipeline monitoring tasks require special types of mobile
robots. For an effective movement along a pipeline, the movement of
the robot will be similar to that of insects or crawling animals. During
its movement along the pipelines, a pipeline monitoring robot has an
important task of finding the shapes of the approaching path on the
pipes. In this paper we propose an effective solution to the pipeline
pattern recognition, based on the fuzzy classification rules for the
measured IR distance data.
Abstract: Current trends in manufacturing are characterized by
production broadening, innovation cycle shortening, and the products
having a new shape, material and functions. The production strategy
focused on time needed change from the traditional functional
production structure to flexible manufacturing cells and lines.
Production by automated manufacturing system (AMS) is one of the
most important manufacturing philosophies in the last years. The
main goals of the project we are involved in lies on building a
laboratory in which will be located a flexible manufacturing system
consisting of at least two production machines with NC control
(milling machines, lathe). These machines will be linked to a
transport system and they will be served by industrial robots. Within
this flexible manufacturing system a station for the quality control
consisting of a camera system and rack warehouse will be also
located. The design, analysis and improvement of this manufacturing
system, specially with a special focus on the communication among
devices constitute the main aims of this paper. The key determining
factors for the manufacturing system design are: the product, the
production volume, the used machines, the disposable manpower, the
disposable infrastructure and the legislative frame for the specific
cases.
Abstract: The Combination of path planning and path following is the main purpose of this paper. This paper describes the developed practical approach to motion control of the MRL small size robots. An intelligent controller is applied to control omni-directional robots motion in simulation and real environment respectively. The Brain Emotional Learning Based Intelligent Controller (BELBIC), based on LQR control is adopted for the omni-directional robots. The contribution of BELBIC in improving the control system performance is shown as application of the emotional learning in a real world problem. Optimizing of the control effort can be achieved in this method too. Next the implicit communication method is used to determine the high level strategies and coordination of the robots. Some simple rules besides using the environment as a memory to improve the coordination between agents make the robots' decision making system. With this simple algorithm our team manifests a desirable cooperation.
Abstract: Many agricultural and especially greenhouse
applications like plant inspection, data gathering, spraying and
selective harvesting could be performed by robots. In this paper
multiple nonholonomic robots are used in order to create a desired
formation scheme for screening solar energy in a greenhouse through
data gathering. The formation consists from a leader and a team
member equipped with appropriate sensors. Each robot is dedicated
to its mission in the greenhouse that is predefined by the
requirements of the application. The feasibility of the proposed
application includes experimental results with three unmanned
ground vehicles (UGV).
Abstract: Nowadays, with the emerging of the new applications
like robot control in image processing, artificial vision for visual
servoing is a rapidly growing discipline and Human-machine
interaction plays a significant role for controlling the robot. This
paper presents a new algorithm based on spatio-temporal volumes for
visual servoing aims to control robots. In this algorithm, after
applying necessary pre-processing on video frames, a spatio-temporal
volume is constructed for each gesture and feature vector is extracted.
These volumes are then analyzed for matching in two consecutive
stages. For hand gesture recognition and classification we tested
different classifiers including k-Nearest neighbor, learning vector
quantization and back propagation neural networks. We tested the
proposed algorithm with the collected data set and results showed the
correct gesture recognition rate of 99.58 percent. We also tested the
algorithm with noisy images and algorithm showed the correct
recognition rate of 97.92 percent in noisy images.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose the pre-processor based on
the Evidence Supporting Measure of Similarity (ESMS) filter and also
propose the unified fusion approach (UFA) based on the general
fusion machine coupled with ESMS filter, which improve the
correctness and precision of information fusion in any fields of
application. Here we mainly apply the new approach to Simultaneous
Localization And Mapping (SLAM) of Pioneer II mobile robots. A
simulation experiment was performed, where an autonomous virtual
mobile robot with sonar sensors evolves in a virtual world map with
obstacles. By comparing the result of building map according to the
general fusion machine (here DSmT-based fusing machine and
PCR5-based conflict redistributor considereded) coupling with ESMS
filter and without ESMS filter, it shows the benefit of the selection of
the sources as a prerequisite for improvement of the information
fusion, and also testifies the superiority of the UFA in dealing with
SLAM.
Abstract: This paper explains a project based learning method where autonomous mini-robots are developed for research, education and entertainment purposes. In case of remote systems wireless sensors are developed in critical areas, which would collect data at specific time intervals, send the data to the central wireless node based on certain preferred information would make decisions to turn on or off a switch or control unit. Such information transfers hardly sums up to a few bytes and hence low data rates would suffice for such implementations. As a robot is a multidisciplinary platform, the interfacing issues involved are discussed in this paper. The paper is mainly focused on power supply, grounding and decoupling issues.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose a novel limited feedback scheme for task planning with service robots. Instead of sending the full service robot state information for the task planning, the proposed scheme send the best-M indices of service robots with a indicator. With the indicator, the proposed scheme significantly reduces the communication overhead for task planning as well as mitigates the system performance degradation in terms of the utility. In addition, we analyze the system performance of the proposed scheme and compare the proposed scheme with the other schemes.
Abstract: To improve HSE standards, oil and gas industries are
interested in using remotely controlled and autonomous robots instead
of human workers on offshore platforms. In addition to earlier reason
this strategy would increase potential revenue, efficient usage of
work experts and even would allow operations in more remote areas.
This article is the presentation of a custom climbing robot, called
Walloid, designed for offshore platform topside automation. This 4
arms climbing robot with grippers is an ongoing project at University
of Oslo.
Abstract: Localization is one of the critical issues in the field of
robot navigation. With an accurate estimate of the robot pose, robots will be capable of navigating in the environment autonomously and efficiently. In this paper, a hybrid Distributed Vision System (DVS)
for robot localization is presented. The presented approach integrates
odometry data from robot and images captured from overhead cameras
installed in the environment to help reduce possibilities of fail
localization due to effects of illumination, encoder accumulated errors,
and low quality range data. An odometry-based motion model is applied to predict robot poses, and robot images captured by overhead
cameras are then used to update pose estimates with HSV histogram-based measurement model. Experiment results show the
presented approach could localize robots in a global world coordinate system with localization errors within 100mm.