Reuleaux: Robot Base Placement by Reachability Analysis

Before beginning any robot task, users must position the robot's base, a task that now depends entirely on user intuition. While slight perturbation is tolerable for robots with moveable bases, correcting the problem is imperative for fixed-base robots if some essential task sections are out of reach. For mobile manipulation robots, it is necessary to decide on a specific base position before beginning manipulation tasks. This paper presents Reuleaux, an open source library for robot reachability analyses and base placement. It reduces the amount of extra repositioning and removes the manual work of identifying potential base locations. Based on the reachability map, base placement locations of a whole robot or only the arm can be efficiently determined. This can be applied to both statically mounted robots, where position of the robot and work piece ensure the maximum amount of work performed, and to mobile robots, where the maximum amount of workable area can be reached. Solutions are not limited only to vertically constrained placement, since complicated robotics tasks require the base to be placed at unique poses based on task demand. All Reuleaux library methods were tested on different robots of different specifications and evaluated for tasks in simulation and real world environment. Evaluation results indicate that Reuleaux had significantly improved performance than prior existing methods in terms of time-efficiency and range of applicability.Comment: Submitted to International Conference of Robotic Computing 201

Dexterity analysis and robot hand design

Understanding about a dexterous robot hand's motion ranges is important to the precision grasping and precision manipulation. A planar robot hand is studied for object orientation, including ranges of motion, measures with respect to the palm, position reaching of a point in the grasped object, and rotation of the object about the reference point. The rotational dexterity index and dexterity chart are introduced and an analysis procedure is developed for calculating these quantities. A design procedure for determining the hand kinematic parameters based on a desired partial or complete dexterity chart is also developed. These procedures have been tested in detail for a planar robot hand with two 2- or 3-link fingers. The derived results are shown to be useful to performance evaluation, kinematic parameter design, and grasping motion planning for a planar robot hand

Manipulator Performance Measures - A Comprehensive Literature Survey

Due to copyright restrictions of the publisher this item is embargoed and access to the file is restricted until a year after the publishing date.The final publication is available at www.springerlink.comPerformance measures are quintessential to the design, synthesis, study and application of robotic manipulators. Numerous performance measures have been defined to study the performance and behavior of manipulators since the early days of robotics; some more widely accepted than others, but their real significance and limitations have not always been well understood. The aim of this survey is to review the definition, classification, scope, and limitations of some of the widely used performance measures. This work provides an extensive bibliography that can be of help to researchers interested in studying and evaluating the performance and behavior of robotic manipulators. Finally, a few recommendations are proposed based on the review so that the most commonly noticed limitations can be avoided when new performance measures are proposed.http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10846-014-0024-y

A New Algorithm for Measuring and Optimizing the Manipulability Index

The estimation of the performance characteristics of robot manipulators is crucial in robot application and design. Furthermore, studying the manipulability index for every point within the workspace of any serial manipulator is considered an important problem. Such studies are required for designing trajectories to avoid singular configurations. In this article, a new method for measuring the manipulability index is proposed, and then some simulations are performed on different industrial manipulators such as the Puma 560 manipulator, a six DOF manipulator and the Mitsubishi Movemaster manipulator

A hyper-redundant manipulator

“Hyper-redundant” manipulators have a very large number of actuatable degrees of freedom. The benefits of hyper-redundant robots include the ability to avoid obstacles, increased robustness with respect to mechanical failure, and the ability to perform new forms of robot locomotion and grasping. The authors examine hyper-redundant manipulator design criteria and the physical implementation of one particular design: a variable geometry truss

Space Applications of Automation, Robotics and Machine Intelligence Systems (ARAMIS), phase 2. Volume 1: Telepresence technology base development

The field of telepresence is defined, and overviews of those capabilities that are now available, and those that will be required to support a NASA telepresence effort are provided. Investigation of NASA's plans and goals with regard to telepresence, extensive literature search for materials relating to relevant technologies, a description of these technologies and their state of the art, and projections for advances in these technologies over the next decade are included. Several space projects are examined in detail to determine what capabilities are required of a telepresence system in order to accomplish various tasks, such as servicing and assembly. The key operational and technological areas are identified, conclusions and recommendations are made for further research, and an example developmental program is presented, leading to an operational telepresence servicer

Robot Autonomy for Surgery

Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous surgical robots