A hazard control system for robot manipulators

A robot for space applications will be required to complete a variety of tasks in an uncertain, harsh environment. This fact presents unusual and highly difficult challenges to ensuring the safety of astronauts and keeping the equipment they depend on from becoming damaged. The systematic approach being taken to control hazards that could result from introducing robotics technology in the space environment is described. First, system safety management and engineering principles, techniques, and requirements are discussed as they relate to Shuttle payload design and operation in general. The concepts of hazard, hazard category, and hazard control, as defined by the Shuttle payload safety requirements, is explained. Next, it is shown how these general safety management and engineering principles are being implemented on an actual project. An example is presented of a hazard control system for controlling one of the hazards identified for the Development Test Flight (DTF-1) of NASA's Flight Telerobotic Servicer, a teleoperated space robot. How these schemes can be applied to terrestrial robots is discussed as well. The same software monitoring and control approach will insure the safe operation of a slave manipulator under teleoperated or autonomous control in undersea, nuclear, or manufacturing applications where the manipulator is working in the vicinity of humans or critical hardware

Human-robot coexistence and interaction in open industrial cells

Recent research results on human\u2013robot interaction and collaborative robotics are leaving behind the traditional paradigm of robots living in a separated space inside safety cages, allowing humans and robot to work together for completing an increasing number of complex industrial tasks. In this context, safety of the human operator is a main concern. In this paper, we present a framework for ensuring human safety in a robotic cell that allows human\u2013robot coexistence and dependable interaction. The framework is based on a layered control architecture that exploits an effective algorithm for online monitoring of relative human\u2013robot distance using depth sensors. This method allows to modify in real time the robot behavior depending on the user position, without limiting the operative robot workspace in a too conservative way. In order to guarantee redundancy and diversity at the safety level, additional certified laser scanners monitor human\u2013robot proximity in the cell and safe communication protocols and logical units are used for the smooth integration with an industrial software for safe low-level robot control. The implemented concept includes a smart human-machine interface to support in-process collaborative activities and for a contactless interaction with gesture recognition of operator commands. Coexistence and interaction are illustrated and tested in an industrial cell, in which a robot moves a tool that measures the quality of a polished metallic part while the operator performs a close evaluation of the same workpiece

Design and implementation of a domestic disinfection robot based on 2D lidar

In the battle against the Covid-19, the demand for disinfection robots in China and other countries has increased rapidly. Manual disinfection is time-consuming, laborious, and has safety hazards. For large public areas, the deployment of human resources and the effectiveness of disinfection face significant challenges. Using robots for disinfection therefore becomes an ideal choice. At present, most disinfection robots on the market use ultraviolet or disinfectant to disinfect, or both. They are mostly put into service in hospitals, airports, hotels, shopping malls, office buildings, or other places with daily high foot traffic. These robots are often built-in with automatic navigation and intelligent recognition, ensuring day-to-day operations. However, they usually are expensive and need regular maintenance. The sweeping robots and window-cleaning robots have been put into massive use, but the domestic disinfection robots have not gained much attention. The health and safety of a family are also critical in epidemic prevention. This thesis proposes a low-cost, 2D lidar-based domestic disinfection robot and implements it. The robot possesses dry fog disinfection, ultraviolet disinfection, and air cleaning. The thesis is mainly engaged in the following work: The design and implementation of the control board of the robot chassis are elaborated in this thesis. The control board uses STM32F103ZET6 as the MCU. Infrared sensors are used in the robot to prevent from falling over and walk along the wall. The Ultrasonic sensor is installed in the front of the chassis to detect and avoid the path's obstacles. Photoelectric switches are used to record the information when the potential collisions happen in the early phase of mapping. The disinfection robot adopts a centrifugal fan and HEPA filter for air purification. The ceramic atomizer is used to break up the disinfectant's molecular structure to produce the dry fog. The UV germicidal lamp is installed at the bottom of the chassis to disinfect the ground. The robot uses an air pollution sensor to estimate the air quality. Motors are used to drive the chassis to move. The lidar transmits its data to the navigation board directly through the wires and the edge-board contact on the control board. The control board also manages the atmosphere LEDs, horn, press-buttons, battery, LDC, and temperature-humidity sensor. It exchanges data with and executes the command from the navigation board and manages all kinds of peripheral devices. Thus, it is the administrative unit of the disinfection robot. Moreover, the robot is designed in a way that reduces costs while ensuring quality. The control board’s embedded software is realized and analyzed in the thesis. The communication protocol that links the control board and the navigation board is implemented in software. Standard commands, specific commands, error handling, and the data packet format are detailed and processed in software. The software effectively drives and manages the peripheral devices. SLAMWARE CORE is used as the navigation board to complete the system design. System tests like disinfecting, mapping, navigating, and anti-falling were performed to polish and adjust the structure and functionalities of the robot. Raspberry Pi is also used with the control board to explore 2D Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms, such as Hector, Karto, and Cartographer, in Robot Operating System (ROS) for the robot’s further development. The thesis is written from the perspective of engineering practice and proposes a feasible design for a domestic disinfection robot. Hardware, embedded software, and system tests are covered in the thesis

A Fuzzy Logic Architecture for Rehabilitation Robotic Systems

Robots are highly incorporated in rehabilitation in the last decade to compensate lost functions in disabled individuals. By controlling the rehabilitation robots from far, many benefits are achieved. These benefits include but not restricted to minimum hospital stays, decreasing cost, and increasing the level of care. The main goal of this work is to have an effective solution to take care of patients from far. Tackling the problem of the remote control of rehabilitation robots is undergoing and highly challenging. In this paper, a remote wrist rehabilitation system is presented. The developed system is a sophisticated robot ensuring the two wrist movements (Flexion /extension and abduction/adduction). Additionally, the proposed system provides a software interface enabling the physiotherapists to control the rehabilitation process remotely. The patient’s safety during the therapy is achieved through the integration of a fuzzy controller in the system control architecture. The fuzzy controller is employed to control the robot action according to the pain felt by the patient. By using fuzzy logic approach, the system can adapt effectively according to the patients’ conditions. The Queue Telemetry Transport Protocol (MQTT) is considered to overcome the latency during the human robot interaction. Based on a Kinect camera, the control technique is made gestural. The physiotherapist gestures are detected and transmitted to the software interface to be processed and be sent to the robot. The acquired measurements are recorded in a database that can be used later to monitor patient progress during the treatment protocol. The obtained experimental results show the effectiveness of the developed remote rehabilitation system

Modelamiento Cinemático Aproximado de un Prototipo de Robot Equino de 6 Grados de Libertad Para un Simulador de Tiro

This article shows the design, analysis and manufacturing of one equine robot prototype with six degrees of freedom along with the development and implementation of control software. This software has the purpose to drive and to calculate the robot kinematics. All of this allows studding the elements necessaries to make a simulator of shots for riders that can be used in education areas as a tool of didactic support in the courses in the police national of Colombia, ensuring that the riders do not suffer physical and psychological injuries during their formation and avoiding hurting the horses in the training of that courses. In addition, the riders can interact and experiment of safety way every situation that they could find in real practice. The system is based on the kinematic study according to the Denavit-Hartenberg algorithm, approximate simulation using Kinematic-ARM® and the mathematic medeling in the Matlab® programming environment. All tecniques give aproximate results of location of the manipulator tool.    Finally, it is possible to validate and analising the results comparing the practical and theoric values to determine the TCP error estimated in each movement.Keywords: Direct kinematics, equine robot, Denavit-Hartenberg (D-H), Degrees of Freedom (DOF), Tool Center Point (TCP)

SOTER: A Runtime Assurance Framework for Programming Safe Robotics Systems

The recent drive towards achieving greater autonomy and intelligence in robotics has led to high levels of complexity. Autonomous robots increasingly depend on third party off-the-shelf components and complex machine-learning techniques. This trend makes it challenging to provide strong design-time certification of correct operation. To address these challenges, we present SOTER, a robotics programming framework with two key components: (1) a programming language for implementing and testing high-level reactive robotics software and (2) an integrated runtime assurance (RTA) system that helps enable the use of uncertified components, while still providing safety guarantees. SOTER provides language primitives to declaratively construct a RTA module consisting of an advanced, high-performance controller (uncertified), a safe, lower-performance controller (certified), and the desired safety specification. The framework provides a formal guarantee that a well-formed RTA module always satisfies the safety specification, without completely sacrificing performance by using higher performance uncertified components whenever safe. SOTER allows the complex robotics software stack to be constructed as a composition of RTA modules, where each uncertified component is protected using a RTA module. To demonstrate the efficacy of our framework, we consider a real-world case-study of building a safe drone surveillance system. Our experiments both in simulation and on actual drones show that the SOTER-enabled RTA ensures the safety of the system, including when untrusted third-party components have bugs or deviate from the desired behavior