29,630 research outputs found
Supervised Autonomous Locomotion and Manipulation for Disaster Response with a Centaur-like Robot
Mobile manipulation tasks are one of the key challenges in the field of
search and rescue (SAR) robotics requiring robots with flexible locomotion and
manipulation abilities. Since the tasks are mostly unknown in advance, the
robot has to adapt to a wide variety of terrains and workspaces during a
mission. The centaur-like robot Centauro has a hybrid legged-wheeled base and
an anthropomorphic upper body to carry out complex tasks in environments too
dangerous for humans. Due to its high number of degrees of freedom, controlling
the robot with direct teleoperation approaches is challenging and exhausting.
Supervised autonomy approaches are promising to increase quality and speed of
control while keeping the flexibility to solve unknown tasks. We developed a
set of operator assistance functionalities with different levels of autonomy to
control the robot for challenging locomotion and manipulation tasks. The
integrated system was evaluated in disaster response scenarios and showed
promising performance.Comment: In Proceedings of IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent
Robots and Systems (IROS), Madrid, Spain, October 201
Mechanical Design, Modelling and Control of a Novel Aerial Manipulator
In this paper a novel aerial manipulation system is proposed. The mechanical
structure of the system, the number of thrusters and their geometry will be
derived from technical optimization problems. The aforementioned problems are
defined by taking into consideration the desired actuation forces and torques
applied to the end-effector of the system. The framework of the proposed system
is designed in a CAD Package in order to evaluate the system parameter values.
Following this, the kinematic and dynamic models are developed and an adaptive
backstepping controller is designed aiming to control the exact position and
orientation of the end-effector in the Cartesian space. Finally, the
performance of the system is demonstrated through a simulation study, where a
manipulation task scenario is investigated.Comment: Comments: 8 Pages, 2015 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation (ICRA '15), Seattle, WA, US
Learning to Navigate Cloth using Haptics
We present a controller that allows an arm-like manipulator to navigate
deformable cloth garments in simulation through the use of haptic information.
The main challenge of such a controller is to avoid getting tangled in, tearing
or punching through the deforming cloth. Our controller aggregates force
information from a number of haptic-sensing spheres all along the manipulator
for guidance. Based on haptic forces, each individual sphere updates its target
location, and the conflicts that arise between this set of desired positions is
resolved by solving an inverse kinematic problem with constraints.
Reinforcement learning is used to train the controller for a single
haptic-sensing sphere, where a training run is terminated (and thus penalized)
when large forces are detected due to contact between the sphere and a
simplified model of the cloth. In simulation, we demonstrate successful
navigation of a robotic arm through a variety of garments, including an
isolated sleeve, a jacket, a shirt, and shorts. Our controller out-performs two
baseline controllers: one without haptics and another that was trained based on
large forces between the sphere and cloth, but without early termination.Comment: Supplementary video available at https://youtu.be/iHqwZPKVd4A.
Related publications http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~karenliu/Robotic_dressing.htm
- …