Climbing and Walking Robots

Nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific researches. The shift of robotics researches from manufacturing to services applications is clear. During the last decades interest in studying climbing and walking robots has been increased. This increasing interest has been in many areas that most important ones of them are: mechanics, electronics, medical engineering, cybernetics, controls, and computers. Today’s climbing and walking robots are a combination of manipulative, perceptive, communicative, and cognitive abilities and they are capable of performing many tasks in industrial and non- industrial environments. Surveillance, planetary exploration, emergence rescue operations, reconnaissance, petrochemical applications, construction, entertainment, personal services, intervention in severe environments, transportation, medical and etc are some applications from a very diverse application fields of climbing and walking robots. By great progress in this area of robotics it is anticipated that next generation climbing and walking robots will enhance lives and will change the way the human works, thinks and makes decisions. This book presents the state of the art achievments, recent developments, applications and future challenges of climbing and walking robots. These are presented in 24 chapters by authors throughtot the world The book serves as a reference especially for the researchers who are interested in mobile robots. It also is useful for industrial engineers and graduate students in advanced study

Bio-Inspired Robotics

Modern robotic technologies have enabled robots to operate in a variety of unstructured and dynamically-changing environments, in addition to traditional structured environments. Robots have, thus, become an important element in our everyday lives. One key approach to develop such intelligent and autonomous robots is to draw inspiration from biological systems. Biological structure, mechanisms, and underlying principles have the potential to provide new ideas to support the improvement of conventional robotic designs and control. Such biological principles usually originate from animal or even plant models, for robots, which can sense, think, walk, swim, crawl, jump or even fly. Thus, it is believed that these bio-inspired methods are becoming increasingly important in the face of complex applications. Bio-inspired robotics is leading to the study of innovative structures and computing with sensory–motor coordination and learning to achieve intelligence, flexibility, stability, and adaptation for emergent robotic applications, such as manipulation, learning, and control. This Special Issue invites original papers of innovative ideas and concepts, new discoveries and improvements, and novel applications and business models relevant to the selected topics of ``Bio-Inspired Robotics''. Bio-Inspired Robotics is a broad topic and an ongoing expanding field. This Special Issue collates 30 papers that address some of the important challenges and opportunities in this broad and expanding field

Contemporary Robotics

This book book is a collection of 18 chapters written by internationally recognized experts and well-known professionals of the field. Chapters contribute to diverse facets of contemporary robotics and autonomous systems. The volume is organized in four thematic parts according to the main subjects, regarding the recent advances in the contemporary robotics. The first thematic topics of the book are devoted to the theoretical issues. This includes development of algorithms for automatic trajectory generation using redudancy resolution scheme, intelligent algorithms for robotic grasping, modelling approach for reactive mode handling of flexible manufacturing and design of an advanced controller for robot manipulators. The second part of the book deals with different aspects of robot calibration and sensing. This includes a geometric and treshold calibration of a multiple robotic line-vision system, robot-based inline 2D/3D quality monitoring using picture-giving and laser triangulation, and a study on prospective polymer composite materials for flexible tactile sensors. The third part addresses issues of mobile robots and multi-agent systems, including SLAM of mobile robots based on fusion of odometry and visual data, configuration of a localization system by a team of mobile robots, development of generic real-time motion controller for differential mobile robots, control of fuel cells of mobile robots, modelling of omni-directional wheeled-based robots, building of hunter- hybrid tracking environment, as well as design of a cooperative control in distributed population-based multi-agent approach. The fourth part presents recent approaches and results in humanoid and bioinspirative robotics. It deals with design of adaptive control of anthropomorphic biped gait, building of dynamic-based simulation for humanoid robot walking, building controller for perceptual motor control dynamics of humans and biomimetic approach to control mechatronic structure using smart materials

Design and Real Time Control of a Versatile Scansorial Robot

This thesis presents investigations into the development of a versatile scansorial mobile robot and real-time realisation of a control system for different configurations of the robot namely climbing mode, walking mode and steering mode. The mobile robot comprises of a hybrid leg and wheel mechanism with innovative design that enables it to interchange its configuration to perform the specific tasks of pole climbing in climbing mode, walking and step climbing in walking mode, and skid steering and inclined slope climbing in steering mode. The motivation of this research is due to the surrounding environment which is not always structured for exploration or navigation missions, and thus poses significant difficulty for the robot to manoeuvre and accomplish the intended task. Hence, the development of versatile scansorial robot with a flexible and interchangeable configuration can provide a broad range of applications and locomotion system and to achieve the mission objective successfully. The robot design consists of four arms/legs with wheel attached at each end-effector and has two link manipulation capability. In climbing mode, the arms are configured as grippers to grip the pole and wheels accelerate to ascend or descend. The climbing angle is monitored to retain the level of the robot while climbing. However, in walking mode, the arms are configured as legs and the wheels are disabled. By implementing a periodic walking gait, the robot is capable of performing stable walking and step climbing. In steering mode, the arms are configured as suspension and the wheels are used for manoeuvring. In this mode, the skid steering system is used to enable the robot perform the turn. The versatile scansorial robot’s configurations and locomotion capabilities are assessed experimentally in real time implementation using the physical prototype. The experiments provided demonstrate the versatility of the robot and successfully fulfill the aims and objectives of the research

The Design and Realization of a Sensitive Walking Platform

Legged locomotion provides robots with the capability of adapting to different terrain conditions. General complex terrain traversal methodologies solely rely on proprioception which readily leads to instability under dynamical situations. Biological legged locomotion utilizes somatosensory feedback to sense the real-time interaction of the feet with ground to enhance stability. Nevertheless, limited attention has been given to sensing the feet-terrain interaction in robotics. This project introduces a paradigm shift in robotic walking called sensitive walking realized through the development of a compliant bipedal platform. Sensitive walking extends upon the success of sensitive manipulation which utilizes tactile feedback to localize an object to grasp, determine an appropriate manipulation configuration, and constantly adapts to maintain grasp stability. Based on the same concepts of sensitive manipulation, sensitive walking utilizes podotactile feedback to enhance real-time walking stability by effectively adapting to variations in the terrain. Adapting legged robotic platforms to sensitive walking is not as simple as attaching any tactile sensor to the feet of a robot. The sensors and the limbs need to have specific characteristics that support the implementation of the algorithms and allow the biped to safely come in contact with the terrain and detect the interaction forces. The challenges in handling the synergy of hardware and sensor design, and fabrication in a podotactile-based sensitive walking robot are addressed. The bipedal platform provides contact compliance through 12 series elastic actuators and contains 190 highly flexible tactile sensors capable of sensing forces at any incident angle. Sensitive walking algorithms are provided to handle multi-legged locomotion challenges including stairs and irregular terrain

Modeling, analysis and control of robot-object nonsmooth underactuated Lagrangian systems: A tutorial overview and perspectives

International audienceSo-called robot-object Lagrangian systems consist of a class of nonsmooth underactuated complementarity Lagrangian systems, with a specific structure: an "object" and a "robot". Only the robot is actuated. The object dynamics can thus be controlled only through the action of the contact Lagrange multipliers, which represent the interaction forces between the robot and the object. Juggling, walking, running, hopping machines, robotic systems that manipulate objects, tapping, pushing systems, kinematic chains with joint clearance, crawling, climbing robots, some cable-driven manipulators, and some circuits with set-valued nonsmooth components, belong this class. This article aims at presenting their main features, then many application examples which belong to the robot-object class, then reviewing the main tools and control strategies which have been proposed in the Automatic Control and in the Robotics literature. Some comments and open issues conclude the article

Climbing and Walking Robots

With the advancement of technology, new exciting approaches enable us to render mobile robotic systems more versatile, robust and cost-efficient. Some researchers combine climbing and walking techniques with a modular approach, a reconfigurable approach, or a swarm approach to realize novel prototypes as flexible mobile robotic platforms featuring all necessary locomotion capabilities. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the latest wide-range achievements in climbing and walking robotic technology to researchers, scientists, and engineers throughout the world. Different aspects including control simulation, locomotion realization, methodology, and system integration are presented from the scientific and from the technical point of view. This book consists of two main parts, one dealing with walking robots, the second with climbing robots. The content is also grouped by theoretical research and applicative realization. Every chapter offers a considerable amount of interesting and useful information

Humanoid Robots

For many years, the human being has been trying, in all ways, to recreate the complex mechanisms that form the human body. Such task is extremely complicated and the results are not totally satisfactory. However, with increasing technological advances based on theoretical and experimental researches, man gets, in a way, to copy or to imitate some systems of the human body. These researches not only intended to create humanoid robots, great part of them constituting autonomous systems, but also, in some way, to offer a higher knowledge of the systems that form the human body, objectifying possible applications in the technology of rehabilitation of human beings, gathering in a whole studies related not only to Robotics, but also to Biomechanics, Biomimmetics, Cybernetics, among other areas. This book presents a series of researches inspired by this ideal, carried through by various researchers worldwide, looking for to analyze and to discuss diverse subjects related to humanoid robots. The presented contributions explore aspects about robotic hands, learning, language, vision and locomotion

Scaled Autonomy for Networked Humanoids

Humanoid robots have been developed with the intention of aiding in environments designed for humans. As such, the control of humanoid morphology and effectiveness of human robot interaction form the two principal research issues for deploying these robots in the real world. In this thesis work, the issue of humanoid control is coupled with human robot interaction under the framework of scaled autonomy, where the human and robot exchange levels of control depending on the environment and task at hand. This scaled autonomy is approached with control algorithms for reactive stabilization of human commands and planned trajectories that encode semantically meaningful motion preferences in a sequential convex optimization framework. The control and planning algorithms have been extensively tested in the field for robustness and system verification. The RoboCup competition provides a benchmark competition for autonomous agents that are trained with a human supervisor. The kid-sized and adult-sized humanoid robots coordinate over a noisy network in a known environment with adversarial opponents, and the software and routines in this work allowed for five consecutive championships. Furthermore, the motion planning and user interfaces developed in the work have been tested in the noisy network of the DARPA Robotics Challenge (DRC) Trials and Finals in an unknown environment. Overall, the ability to extend simplified locomotion models to aid in semi-autonomous manipulation allows untrained humans to operate complex, high dimensional robots. This represents another step in the path to deploying humanoids in the real world, based on the low dimensional motion abstractions and proven performance in real world tasks like RoboCup and the DRC