Sensing and Control for Robust Grasping with Simple Hardware

Robots can move, see, and navigate in the real world outside carefully structured factories, but they cannot yet grasp and manipulate objects without human intervention. Two key barriers are the complexity of current approaches, which require complicated hardware or precise perception to function effectively, and the challenge of understanding system performance in a tractable manner given the wide range of factors that impact successful grasping. This thesis presents sensors and simple control algorithms that relax the requirements on robot hardware, and a framework to understand the capabilities and limitations of grasping systems.Engineering and Applied Science

Introduction. Global City, Take 2: A View from Urban History

This introduction takes stock of the disjuncture between several seams of urban studies and historical research. Scholars who paid attention to global cities and the internationalization ofmunicipal government have focused on the recent decades. Their position was based on the view that cities became irrelevant with the rise of the nation state, and only recently returned as independent actors. It suggests ways to reckon with the 'transnational municipal moment' in its different forms since the mid 19th century. From then onwards, not only cities were increasingly part of a transnational municipalization trend, but they also actively exchanged know hows and policies through study tours, conferences or correspondence. To account for continuity and changes in these activities, this piece suggests to consider the circulatory regimes that have shaped and oriented these connections among and about municipal urban governments.Ce chapitre introductif revient sur le désintérêt mutuel entre historiens de l'urbain, spécialistes des global cities et chercheurs sur l'internationalisation des gouvernements municipaux. Du côté des historiens, ce n'est que récemment que l'intérêt s'est porté vers les approches en termes d'histoire globale, transnationale ou croisée. De l'autre côté, les sociologues et politistes du temps présent considéraient que ce n'était que récemment que les gouvernements municipaux urbains redevenaient des acteurs sur la scène internationale, après une longue éclipse qui commencerait avec la construction des états-nations. Or, ce moment même de municipalisation du monde est marqué par des circulations entre espaces nationaux. Et d'autre part, c'est sur la longue durée que se sont développés des relations intermunicipales où savoir faire, politiques municipales et catégories d'actions s'échangeaient par le biais de revues, congrès et associations. Il s'agit enfin de suggérer une méthodologie pour retrouver les structures et les desseins qui présidèrent à l'orientation et à la définition de ces circulations et connexions entre municipalités

ダイレクトセンシング技術を用いた斜面災害リスク軽減手法の開発――特に湿潤熱帯ベトナム山地域の管理に関連して――

東北学院大学2022年

Ultra high frequency (UHF) radio-frequency identification (RFID) for robot perception and mobile manipulation

Personal robots with autonomy, mobility, and manipulation capabilities have the potential to dramatically improve quality of life for various user populations, such as older adults and individuals with motor impairments. Unfortunately, unstructured environments present many challenges that hinder robot deployment in ordinary homes. This thesis seeks to address some of these challenges through a new robotic sensing modality that leverages a small amount of environmental augmentation in the form of Ultra High Frequency (UHF) Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) tags. Previous research has demonstrated the utility of infrastructure tags (affixed to walls) for robot localization; in this thesis, we specifically focus on tagging objects. Owing to their low-cost and passive (battery-free) operation, users can apply UHF RFID tags to hundreds of objects throughout their homes. The tags provide two valuable properties for robots: a unique identifier and receive signal strength indicator (RSSI, the strength of a tag's response). This thesis explores robot behaviors and radio frequency perception techniques using robot-mounted UHF RFID readers that enable a robot to efficiently discover, locate, and interact with UHF RFID tags applied to objects and people of interest. The behaviors and algorithms explicitly rely on the robot's mobility and manipulation capabilities to provide multiple opportunistic views of the complex electromagnetic landscape inside a home environment. The electromagnetic properties of RFID tags change when applied to common household objects. Objects can have varied material properties, can be placed in diverse orientations, and be relocated to completely new environments. We present a new class of optimization-based techniques for RFID sensing that are robust to the variation in tag performance caused by these complexities. We discuss a hybrid global-local search algorithm where a robot employing long-range directional antennas searches for tagged objects by maximizing expected RSSI measurements; that is, the robot attempts to position itself (1) near a desired tagged object and (2) oriented towards it. The robot first performs a sparse, global RFID search to locate a pose in the neighborhood of the tagged object, followed by a series of local search behaviors (bearing estimation and RFID servoing) to refine the robot's state within the local basin of attraction. We report on RFID search experiments performed in Georgia Tech's Aware Home (a real home). Our optimization-based approach yields superior performance compared to state of the art tag localization algorithms, does not require RF sensor models, is easy to implement, and generalizes to other short-range RFID sensor systems embedded in a robot's end effector. We demonstrate proof of concept applications, such as medication delivery and multi-sensor fusion, using these techniques. Through our experimental results, we show that UHF RFID is a complementary sensing modality that can assist robots in unstructured human environments.PhDCommittee Chair: Kemp, Charles C.; Committee Member: Abowd, Gregory; Committee Member: Howard, Ayanna; Committee Member: Ingram, Mary Ann; Committee Member: Reynolds, Matt; Committee Member: Tentzeris, Emmanoui