The KIT swiss knife gripper for disassembly tasks: a multi-functional gripper for bimanual manipulation with a single arm

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.This work presents the concept of a robotic gripper designed for the disassembly of electromechanical devices that comprises several innovative ideas. Novel concepts include the ability to interchange built-in tools without the need to grasp them, the ability to reposition grasped objects in-hand, the capability of performing classic dual arm manipulation within the gripper and the utilization of classic industrial robotic arms kinematics within a robotic gripper. We analyze state of the art grippers and robotic hands designed for dexterous in-hand manipulation and extract common characteristics and weak points. The presented concept is obtained from the task requirements for disassembly of electromechanical devices and it is then evaluated for general purpose grasping, in-hand manipulation and operations with tools. We further present the CAD design for a first prototype.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Fabrication and characterization of nanostructured fluorine doped tin oxide thin film for dssc by hydrothermal method

Nanostructured Fluorine Doped Tin Oxide (FTO) thin film has been successfully synthesized on top of bare FTO layer substrates using hydrothermal method. The performance of FTO thin film including conductivity and transparency depend on the surface morphology and the properties of the material. Hydrothermal method has proven to be a very good method for the fabrication of novel metal oxides. Thus, a new nanostructured FTO thin film like nanorice has been fabricated using one step hydrothermal method. FTO nanorice thin films were obtained from the reaction of tin (iv) chloride (SnCl4), ammonium fluoride (NH4F), acetone, deionized water and hydrochloric acid (HCl). The compound was prepared in an autoclave at 150°C hydrothermal temperature for different reaction times of 5 hours, 10 hours, 15 hours, and 20 hours. FESEM studies on the surface morphologies of all the samples showed that nanorice structure had formed to fully cover the bare FTO substrate. Then, to further the optimization of FTO nanorice thin film, this research focused on studying the effect of hydrothermal temperature on FTO nanorice thin films. The experiments were conducted at 130°C, 140°C, 150°C, 160°C, and 170°C of hydrothermal temperature in constant reaction time of 10 hours. Basically, there were six properties studied; surface morphology, structural, element composition, thickness measurement, electrical and optical properties. At the end of this research, homogeneous FTO thin film has been successfully prepared. By controlling the reaction time and hydrothermal temperature, a transparent FTO film with beyond 85% percentage of transmittance was developed. The FTO thin film produced at 10 hour reaction time and 150°C of hydrothermal temperature time gave the low sheet resistance of 0.012 Ohm/sq with high transparency. The DSSC fabricated using the optimized FTO film gave higher efficiency of 2.77% compared to commercial FTO of 1.93%

Interest of the dual hybrid control scheme for teleoperation with time delays

A new scheme of teleoperation called "dual hybrid control" is described. It is shown that telepresence is increased compared to traditional force feedback schemes. It is particulary well suited for time delay teleoperation

Digital Twin framework for Extended Reality, by integrating Nachi and SCARA Robot in XR-lab

Digital Twin is a tool used for monitoring systems and controlling systems at a distance; the twining of systems has been around ever since NASA’s Apollo mission; creating a digital twin lets people monitor the system in real-time. A digital twin also allows for modeling, configuration, testing, optimization, and research under dynamic circumstances; it also provides for hazardous free training on systems that can be hard reach, i.e., offshore. Extended reality is a gathering term for all virtual environments VR, AR, MR, and shared VR, the last one allowing a team to monitor a system together without the need for a headset displaying the information. UiT Narvik has an XR lab based on shared VR; here it is possible to create a collaborative environment around a digital twin. This project is centered around creating a digital twin in the XR lab and making a know-how framework to facilitate a base for more digital twins. The thesis has resulted in two digital twin models that can be used in the XR lab, the robots are located at UiT Narvik, and a proposed method for connecting has been made. The models are created in Unity based on the URDF for each robot; controls have been established for controlling the robots inside the XR environment at the same time as controlling the XR lab. The proposed method for communicating with the robots is to use the Open Sound Control protocol and bridge it with python to the OPC UA server connected to the robots. The know-how framework for integrating a digital twin is presented in the result part of the report

Corrupted MP4 carving using MP4-karver

The usage of digital video is rapidly increasing recently. The analog CCTV systems are replaced by digital systems. Moreover, digital cameras and smartphones are increasingly popular and becoming affordable. The criminals use these digital devices; particularly smartphones to record crimes such as child pornography and other violent activities. Many at times, these videos are altered or deleted by the criminals in order to avoid persecution by the law enforcement. In digital forensic, carvings of deleted, damaged video files have an important role in searching for evidence. Therefore, many existing tools and techniques such as Scalpel’s, PhotoRec, Bi-Fragment Gap Carving (BGC), Smart Carving and Frame Based Carving attempt to carve the videos files, but some of the carved videos files are usually corrupted or damaged and not playable. However, there is still room for improvement in repair corrupted MP4 videos to make it playable. In this research, MP4-Karver tool is proposed to carve and repair the corrupted MP4 videos. MP4-Karver is developed by using visual studio platform in C# programming language. The proposed MP4-Karver tool focuses on carving, repair corrupted MP4 videos and getting a higher successful rate of playable MP4 video file format. The experimental result shows that the proposed MP4-Karver tool increases the restoration carving and repairing of MP4 corrupted videos with average of 97% improvement as compared to PhotoRec and Scalpel. The MP4-Karver tool is a good alternative for MP4 videos restoration and repairing damaged videos as compared to other tools and techniques

Design of a SCARA Based Mobile 3D Printing Platform

Currently 3D printers rely heavily on people to run them, there is no automatic way to start a new print after one has finished. On top of this 3D printers are limited in the area they can print on. Even though the additive manufacturing market is rapidly growing and is increasingly being used in product manufacturing there has yet to be a solution to this problem. This research proposes using mobile 3D printing robots to solve both of these issues. The proposed prototype utilizes a Selective Compliance Assembly Robot Arm (SCARA) based robot capable of cooperatively manufacturing parts. This allows for multiple robots to build single parts, decreasing the time taken for 3D printing and allowing for multiple materials to be used. With the robots being mobile it allows for multiple prints to be done consecutively without the need for human input. The design shown here features a fused deposition modeling (FDM) tool-head. In this research a concept was designed and realized through a prototype and subsequent evaluation. From the evaluation of this prototype design, knowledge was gained to be used in the design of a production version at a later date