Stanford Aerospace Research Laboratory research overview

Over the last ten years, the Stanford Aerospace Robotics Laboratory (ARL) has developed a hardware facility in which a number of space robotics issues have been, and continue to be, addressed. This paper reviews two of the current ARL research areas: navigation and control of free flying space robots, and modelling and control of extremely flexible space structures. The ARL has designed and built several semi-autonomous free-flying robots that perform numerous tasks in a zero-gravity, drag-free, two-dimensional environment. It is envisioned that future generations of these robots will be part of a human-robot team, in which the robots will operate under the task-level commands of astronauts. To make this possible, the ARL has developed a graphical user interface (GUI) with an intuitive object-level motion-direction capability. Using this interface, the ARL has demonstrated autonomous navigation, intercept and capture of moving and spinning objects, object transport, multiple-robot cooperative manipulation, and simple assemblies from both free-flying and fixed bases. The ARL has also built a number of experimental test beds on which the modelling and control of flexible manipulators has been studied. Early ARL experiments in this arena demonstrated for the first time the capability to control the end-point position of both single-link and multi-link flexible manipulators using end-point sensing. Building on these accomplishments, the ARL has been able to control payloads with unknown dynamics at the end of a flexible manipulator, and to achieve high-performance control of a multi-link flexible manipulator

The Effects of Finger-Walking in Place (FWIP) on Spatial Knowledge Acquisition in Virtual Environments

Spatial knowledge, necessary for efficient navigation, comprises route knowledge (memory of landmarks along a route) and survey knowledge (overall representation like a map). Virtual environments (VEs) have been suggested as a power tool for understanding some issues associated with human navigation, such as spatial knowledge acquisition. The Finger-Walking-in-Place (FWIP) interaction technique is a locomotion technique for navigation tasks in immersive virtual environments (IVEs). The FWIP was designed to map a human’s embodied ability overlearned by natural walking for navigation, to finger-based interaction technique. Its implementation on Lemur and iPhone/iPod Touch devices was evaluated in our previous studies. In this paper, we present a comparative study of the joystick’s flying technique versus the FWIP. Our experiment results show that the FWIP results in better performance than the joystick’s flying for route knowledge acquisition in our maze navigation tasks

Adjustably Autonomous Multi-agent Plan Execution with an Internal Spacecraft Free-Flying Robot Prototype

We present an multi-agent model-based autonomy architecture with monitoring, planning, diagnosis, and execution elements. We discuss an internal spacecraft free-flying robot prototype controlled by an implementation of this architecture and a ground test facility used for development. In addition, we discuss a simplified environment control life support system for the spacecraft domain also controlled by an implementation of this architecture. We discuss adjustable autonomy and how it applies to this architecture. We describe an interface that provides the user situation awareness of both autonomous systems and enables the user to dynamically edit the plans prior to and during execution as well as control these agents at various levels of autonomy. This interface also permits the agents to query the user or request the user to perform tasks to help achieve the commanded goals. We conclude by describing a scenario where these two agents and a human interact to cooperatively detect, diagnose and recover from a simulated spacecraft fault

AltURI: a thin middleware for simulated robot vision applications

Fast software performance is often the focus when developing real-time vision-based control applications for robot simulators. In this paper we have developed a thin, high performance middleware for USARSim and other simulators designed for real-time vision-based control applications. It includes a fast image server providing images in OpenCV, Matlab or web formats and a simple command/sensor processor. The interface has been tested in USARSim with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle using two control applications; landing using a reinforcement learning algorithm and altitude control using elementary motion detection. The middleware has been found to be fast enough to control the flying robot as well as very easy to set up and use

The design-by-adaptation approach to universal access: learning from videogame technology

This paper proposes an alternative approach to the design of universally accessible interfaces to that provided by formal design frameworks applied ab initio to the development of new software. This approach, design-byadaptation, involves the transfer of interface technology and/or design principles from one application domain to another, in situations where the recipient domain is similar to the host domain in terms of modelled systems, tasks and users. Using the example of interaction in 3D virtual environments, the paper explores how principles underlying the design of videogame interfaces may be applied to a broad family of visualization and analysis software which handles geographical data (virtual geographic environments, or VGEs). One of the motivations behind the current study is that VGE technology lags some way behind videogame technology in the modelling of 3D environments, and has a less-developed track record in providing the variety of interaction methods needed to undertake varied tasks in 3D virtual worlds by users with varied levels of experience. The current analysis extracted a set of interaction principles from videogames which were used to devise a set of 3D task interfaces that have been implemented in a prototype VGE for formal evaluation

Freeform User Interfaces for Graphical Computing

報告番号: 甲15222 ; 学位授与年月日: 2000-03-29 ; 学位の種別: 課程博士 ; 学位の種類: 博士(工学) ; 学位記番号: 博工第4717号 ; 研究科・専攻: 工学系研究科情報工学専

Teleoperating a mobile manipulator and a free-flying camera from a single haptic device

© 2016 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 worksThe paper presents a novel teleoperation system that allows the simultaneous and continuous command of a ground mobile manipulator and a free flying camera, implemented using an UAV, from which the operator can monitor the task execution in real-time. The proposed decoupled position and orientation workspace mapping allows the teleoperation from a single haptic device with bounded workspace of a complex robot with unbounded workspace. When the operator is reaching the position and orientation boundaries of the haptic workspace, linear and angular velocity components are respectively added to the inputs of the mobile manipulator and the flying camera. A user study on a virtual environment has been conducted to evaluate the performance and the workload on the user before and after proper training. Analysis on the data shows that the system complexity is not an obstacle for an efficient performance. This is a first step towards the implementation of a teleoperation system with a real mobile manipulator and a low-cost quadrotor as the free-flying camera.Accepted versio