Practice of law in the provisioning of accessibility facilities for person with disabilities in Malaysia

Malaysia’s significant changes can be seen clearly through the improvement of social welfare of the disabled and people with disabilities. Although the governments has carried out various policies and provide facilities as well as provision for the disabled but there are still many obstacles encountered by people with disabilities, especially the legal and the accessibility of facilities and services. Therefore, this paper attempts to discuss the practice of law relating of legal procedure particularly for disabled users which affects the movement of these people from one destination to another. This paper discusses the practice of law adopted in the preparation of facilities for disabled people to help them make movement independently. The study was conducted by secondary data to the Malaysia legal and policies for disabled person by comparing with United Kingdom (UK). Malaysia has come out with a strong legal framework for disabled person through People with Disabilities Act 2008 (Act 685). There are several areas in the act that still can be improved to support disabled person

Innovative robot hand designs of reduced complexity for dexterous manipulation

This thesis investigates the mechanical design of robot hands to sensibly reduce the system complexity in terms of the number of actuators and sensors, and control needs for performing grasping and in-hand manipulations of unknown objects. Human hands are known to be the most complex, versatile, dexterous manipulators in nature, from being able to operate sophisticated surgery to carry out a wide variety of daily activity tasks (e.g. preparing food, changing cloths, playing instruments, to name some). However, the understanding of why human hands can perform such fascinating tasks still eludes complete comprehension. Since at least the end of the sixteenth century, scientists and engineers have tried to match the sensory and motor functions of the human hand. As a result, many contemporary humanoid and anthropomorphic robot hands have been developed to closely replicate the appearance and dexterity of human hands, in many cases using sophisticated designs that integrate multiple sensors and actuators---which make them prone to error and difficult to operate and control, particularly under uncertainty. In recent years, several simplification approaches and solutions have been proposed to develop more effective and reliable dexterous robot hands. These techniques, which have been based on using underactuated mechanical designs, kinematic synergies, or compliant materials, to name some, have opened up new ways to integrate hardware enhancements to facilitate grasping and dexterous manipulation control and improve reliability and robustness. Following this line of thought, this thesis studies four robot hand hardware aspects for enhancing grasping and manipulation, with a particular focus on dexterous in-hand manipulation. Namely: i) the use of passive soft fingertips; ii) the use of rigid and soft active surfaces in robot fingers; iii) the use of robot hand topologies to create particular in-hand manipulation trajectories; and iv) the decoupling of grasping and in-hand manipulation by introducing a reconfigurable palm. In summary, the findings from this thesis provide important notions for understanding the significance of mechanical and hardware elements in the performance and control of human manipulation. These findings show great potential in developing robust, easily programmable, and economically viable robot hands capable of performing dexterous manipulations under uncertainty, while exhibiting a valuable subset of functions of the human hand.Open Acces

Towards Developing Gripper to obtain Dexterous Manipulation

Artificial hands or grippers are essential elements in many robotic systems, such as, humanoid, industry, social robot, space robot, mobile robot, surgery and so on. As humans, we use our hands in different ways and can perform various maneuvers such as writing, altering posture of an object in-hand without having difficulties. Most of our daily activities are dependent on the prehensile and non-prehensile capabilities of our hand. Therefore, the human hand is the central motivation of grasping and manipulation, and has been explicitly studied from many perspectives such as, from the design of complex actuation, synergy, use of soft material, sensors, etc; however to obtain the adaptability to a plurality of objects along with the capabilities of in-hand manipulation of our hand in a grasping device is not easy, and not fully evaluated by any developed gripper. Industrial researchers primarily use rigid materials and heavy actuators in the design for repeatability, reliability to meet dexterity, precision, time requirements where the required flexibility to manipulate object in-hand is typically absent. On the other hand, anthropomorphic hands are generally developed by soft materials. However they are not deployed for manipulation mainly due to the presence of numerous sensors and consequent control complexity of under-actuated mechanisms that significantly reduce speed and time requirements of industrial demand. Hence, developing artificial hands or grippers with prehensile capabilities and dexterity similar to human like hands is challenging, and it urges combined contributions from multiple disciplines such as, kinematics, dynamics, control, machine learning and so on. Therefore, capabilities of artificial hands in general have been constrained to some specific tasks according to their target applications, such as grasping (in biomimetic hands) or speed/precision in a pick and place (in industrial grippers). Robotic grippers developed during last decades are mostly aimed to solve grasping complexities of several objects as their primary objective. However, due to the increasing demands of industries, many issues are rising and remain unsolved such as in-hand manipulation and placing object with appropriate posture. Operations like twisting, altering orientation of object within-hand, require significant dexterity of the gripper that must be achieved from a compact mechanical design at the first place. Along with manipulation, speed is also required in many robotic applications. Therefore, for the available speed and design simplicity, nonprehensile or dynamic manipulation is widely exploited. The nonprehensile approach however, does not focus on stable grasping in general. Also, nonprehensile or dynamic manipulation often exceeds robot\u2019s kinematic workspace, which additionally urges installation of high speed feedback and robust control. Hence, these approaches are inapplicable especially when, the requirements are grasp oriented such as, precise posture change of a payload in-hand, placing payload afterward according to a strict final configuration. Also, addressing critical payload such as egg, contacts (between gripper and egg) cannot be broken completely during manipulation. Moreover, theoretical analysis, such as contact kinematics, grasp stability cannot predict the nonholonomic behaviors, and therefore, uncertainties are always present to restrict a maneuver, even though the gripper is capable of doing the task. From a technical point of view, in-hand manipulation or within-hand dexterity of a gripper significantly isolates grasping and manipulation skills from the dependencies on contact type, a priory knowledge of object model, configurations such as initial or final postures and also additional environmental constraints like disturbance, that may causes breaking of contacts between object and finger. Hence, the property (in-hand manipulation) is important for a gripper in order to obtain human hand skill. In this research, these problems (to obtain speed, flexibility to a plurality of grasps, within-hand dexterity in a single gripper) have been tackled in a novel way. A gripper platform named Dexclar (DEXterous reConfigurable moduLAR) has been developed in order to study in-hand manipulation, and a generic spherical payload has been considered at the first place. Dexclar is mechanism-centric and it exploits modularity and reconfigurability to the aim of achieving within-hand dexterity rather than utilizing soft materials. And hence, precision, speed are also achievable from the platform. The platform can perform several grasps (pinching, form closure, force closure) and address a very important issue of releasing payload with final posture/ configuration after manipulation. By exploiting 16 degrees of freedom (DoF), Dexclar is capable to provide 6 DoF motions to a generic spherical or ellipsoidal payload. And since a mechanism is reliable, repeatable once it has been properly synthesized, precision and speed are also obtainable from them. Hence Dexclar is an ideal starting point to study within-hand dexterity from kinematic point of view. As the final aim is to develop specific grippers (having the above capabilities) by exploiting Dexclar, a highly dexterous but simply constructed reconfigurable platform named VARO-fi (VARiable Orientable fingers with translation) is proposed, which can be used as an industrial end-effector, as well as an alternative of bio-inspired gripper in many robotic applications. The robust four fingered VARO-fi addresses grasp, in-hand manipulation and release (payload with desired configuration) of plurality of payloads, as demonstrated in this thesis. Last but not the least, several tools and end-effectors have been constructed to study prehensile and non-prehensile manipulation, thanks to Bayer Robotic challenge 2017, where the feasibility and their potentiality to use them in an industrial environment have been validated. The above mentioned research will enhance a new dimension for designing grippers with the properties of dexterity and flexibility at the same time, without explicit theoretical analysis, algorithms, as those are difficult to implement and sometime not feasible for real system

The role of morphology of the thumb in anthropomorphic grasping : a review

The unique musculoskeletal structure of the human hand brings in wider dexterous capabilities to grasp and manipulate a repertoire of objects than the non-human primates. It has been widely accepted that the orientation and the position of the thumb plays an important role in this characteristic behavior. There have been numerous attempts to develop anthropomorphic robotic hands with varying levels of success. Nevertheless, manipulation ability in those hands is to be ameliorated even though they can grasp objects successfully. An appropriate model of the thumb is important to manipulate the objects against the fingers and to maintain the stability. Modeling these complex interactions about the mechanical axes of the joints and how to incorporate these joints in robotic thumbs is a challenging task. This article presents a review of the biomechanics of the human thumb and the robotic thumb designs to identify opportunities for future anthropomorphic robotic hands

Model Based Control of Soft Robots: A Survey of the State of the Art and Open Challenges

Continuum soft robots are mechanical systems entirely made of continuously deformable elements. This design solution aims to bring robots closer to invertebrate animals and soft appendices of vertebrate animals (e.g., an elephant's trunk, a monkey's tail). This work aims to introduce the control theorist perspective to this novel development in robotics. We aim to remove the barriers to entry into this field by presenting existing results and future challenges using a unified language and within a coherent framework. Indeed, the main difficulty in entering this field is the wide variability of terminology and scientific backgrounds, making it quite hard to acquire a comprehensive view on the topic. Another limiting factor is that it is not obvious where to draw a clear line between the limitations imposed by the technology not being mature yet and the challenges intrinsic to this class of robots. In this work, we argue that the intrinsic effects are the continuum or multi-body dynamics, the presence of a non-negligible elastic potential field, and the variability in sensing and actuation strategies.Comment: 69 pages, 13 figure

Dynamic modelling and visco-elastic parameter identification of a fibre-reinforced soft fluidic elastomer manipulator

A dynamic model of a soft fibre-reinforced fluidic elastomer is presented and experimentally verified, which can be used for model-based controller design. Due to the inherent visco-(hyper)elastic characteristics and nonlinear timedependent behaviour of soft fluidic elastomer robots, analytic dynamic modelling is challenging. The fibre reinforced noninflatable soft fluidic elastomer robot used in this paper can produce both planar and spatial movements. Dynamic equations are developed for both cases. Parameters, related to the viscoelastic behaviour of the robot during elongation and bending motion, are identified experimentally and incorporated into our model. The modified dynamic model is then validated in experiments comparing the time responses of the physical robot with the corresponding outputs of the simulation model. The results validate the accuracy of the proposed dynamic model

Performance of modified jatropha oil in combination with hexagonal boron nitride particles as a bio-based lubricant for green machining

This study evaluates the machining performance of newly developed modified jatropha oils (MJO1, MJO3 and MJO5), both with and without hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) particles (ranging between 0.05 and 0.5 wt%) during turning of AISI 1045 using minimum quantity lubrication (MQL). The experimental results indicated that, viscosity improved with the increase in MJOs molar ratio and hBN concentration. Excellent tribological behaviours is found to correlated with a better machining performance were achieved by MJO5a with 0.05 wt%. The MJO5a sample showed the lowest values of cutting force, cutting temperature and surface roughness, with a prolonged tool life and less tool wear, qualifying itself to be a potential alternative to the synthetic ester, with regard to the environmental concern