A Rapidly Reconfigurable Robotics Workcell and Its Applictions for Tissue Engineering

This article describes the development of a component-based technology robot system that can be rapidly configured to perform a specific manufacturing task. The system is conceived with standard and inter-operable components including actuator modules, rigid link connectors and tools that can be assembled into robots with arbitrary geometry and degrees of freedom. The reconfigurable "plug-and-play" robot kinematic and dynamic modeling algorithms are developed. These algorithms are the basis for the control and simulation of reconfigurable robots. The concept of robot configuration optimization is introduced for the effective use of the rapidly reconfigurable robots. Control and communications of the workcell components are facilitated by a workcell-wide TCP/IP network and device level CAN-bus networks. An object-oriented simulation and visualization software for the reconfigurable robot is developed based on Windows NT. Prototypes of the robot systems configured to perform 3D contour following task and the positioning task are constructed and demonstrated. Applications of such systems for biomedical tissue scaffold fabrication are considered.Singapore-MIT Alliance (SMA

Development of personal area network (PAN) for mobile robot using bluetooth transceiver

The work presents the concept of providing a Personal Area Network (PAN) for microcontroller based mobile robots using Bluetooth transceiver. With the concept of replacing cable, low cost, low power consumption and communication range between 10m to 100m, Bluetooth is suitable for communication between mobile robots since most mobile robots are powered by batteries and have high mobility. The network aimed to support real-time control of up to two mobile robots from a master mobile robot through communication using Bluetooth transceiver. If a fast network radio link is implemented, a whole new world of possibilities is opened in the research of robotics control and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research works, sending real time image and information. Robots could communicate through obstacles or even through walls. Bluetooth Ad Hoc topology provides a simple communication between devices in close by forming PAN. A system contained of both hardware and software is designed to enable the robots to form a PAN and communicating, sharing information. Three microcontroller based mobile robots are built for this research work. Bluetooth Protocol Stack and mobile robot control architecture is implemented on a single microcontroller chip. The PAN enabled a few mobile robots to communicate with each other to complete a given task. The wireless communication between mobile robots is reliable based from the result of experiments carried out. Thus this is a platform for multi mobile robots system and Ad Hoc networking system. Results from experiments show that microcontroller based mobile robots can easily form a Bluetooth PAN and communicate with each other

Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks

In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge, and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control, learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity, localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature, and identify topics that require more research attention in the future

Redesigning the human-robot interface : intuitive teleoperation of anthropomorphic robots

textA novel interface for robotic teleoperation was developed to enable accurate and highly efficient teleoperation of the Industrial Reconfigurable Anthropomorphic Dual-arm (IRAD) system and other robotic systems. In order to achieve a revolutionary increase in operator productivity, the bilateral/master-slave approach must give way to shared autonomy and unilateral control; autonomy must be employed where possible, and appropriate sensory feedback only where autonomy is impossible; and today’s low-information/high feedback model must be replaced by one that emphasizes feedforward precision and minimal corrective feedback. This is emphasized for task spaces outside of the traditional anthropomorphic scale such as mobile manipulation (i.e. large task spaces) and high precision tasks (i.e. very small task spaces). The system is demonstrated using an anthropomorphically dimensioned industrial manipulator working in task spaces from one meter to less than one millimeter, in both simulation and hardware. This thesis discusses the design requirements and philosophy of this interface, provides a summary of prototype teleoperation hardware, simulation environment, test-bed hardware, and experimental results.Mechanical Engineerin

Enabling Parallel Wireless Communication in Mobile Robot Teams

Wireless inter-robot communication enables robot teams to cooperatively solve complex problems that cannot be addressed by a single robot. Applications for cooperative robot teams include search and rescue, exploration and surveillance. Communication is one of the most important components in future autonomous robot systems and is essential for core functions such as inter-robot coordination, neighbour discovery and cooperative control algorithms. In environments where communication infrastructure does not exist, decentralised multi-hop networks can be constructed using only the radios on-board each robot. These are known as wireless mesh networks (WMNs). However existing WMNs have limited capacity to support even small robot teams. There is a need for WMNs where links act like dedicated point-to-point connections such as in wired networks. Addressing this problem requires a fundamentally new approach to WMN construction and this thesis is the first comprehensive study in the multi-robot literature to address these challenges. In this thesis, we propose a new class of communication systems called zero mutual interference (ZMI) networks that are able to emulate the point-to-point properties of a wired network over a WMN implementation. We instantiate the ZMI network using a multi-radio multi-channel architecture that autonomously adapts its topology and channel allocations such that all network edges communicate at the full capacity of the radio hardware. We implement the ZMI network on a 100-radio testbed with up to 20-individual nodes and verify its theoretical properties. Mobile robot experiments also demonstrate these properties are practically achievable. The results are an encouraging indication that the ZMI network approach can facilitate the communication demands of large cooperative robot teams deployed in practical problems such as data pipe-lining, decentralised optimisation, decentralised data fusion and sensor networks