19,420 research outputs found
A hyper-redundant manipulator
“Hyper-redundant” manipulators have a very large number of actuatable degrees of freedom. The benefits of hyper-redundant robots include the ability to avoid obstacles, increased robustness with respect to mechanical failure, and the ability to perform new forms of robot locomotion and grasping. The authors examine hyper-redundant manipulator design criteria and the physical implementation of one particular design: a variable geometry truss
The CLAWAR project
In Europe, there are two main thematic groups focusing on
robotics, the Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR)
project (http://www.clawar.net) and the European Robotics
Network (EURON) project (http://www.euron.org).
The two networks are complementary: CLAWAR is
industrially focused on the immediate needs, and EURON is
focused more on blue skies research. This article presents the activities of the CLAWAR project
The CLAWAR project
In Europe, there are two main thematic groups focusing on
robotics, the Climbing and Walking Robots (CLAWAR)
project (http://www.clawar.net) and the European Robotics
Network (EURON) project (http://www.euron.org).
The two networks are complementary: CLAWAR is
industrially focused on the immediate needs, and EURON is
focused more on blue skies research. This article presents the activities of the CLAWAR project
Grasping bulky objects with two anthropomorphic hands
© 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 worksThis paper presents an algorithm to compute precision grasps for bulky objects using two anthropomorphic hands. We use objects modeled as point clouds obtained from a sensor camera or from a CAD model. We then process the point clouds dividing them into two set of slices where we look for sets of triplets of points. Each triplet must accomplish some physical conditions based on the structure of the hands. Then, the triplets of points from each set of slices are evaluated to find a combination that satisfies the force closure condition (FC). Once one valid couple of triplets have been found the inverse kinematics of the system is computed in order to know if the corresponding points are reachable by the hands, if so, motion planning and a collision check are performed to asses if the final grasp configuration of the system is suitable. The paper
inclu des some application examples of the proposed approachAccepted versio
Robotic Wireless Sensor Networks
In this chapter, we present a literature survey of an emerging, cutting-edge,
and multi-disciplinary field of research at the intersection of Robotics and
Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) which we refer to as Robotic Wireless Sensor
Networks (RWSN). We define a RWSN as an autonomous networked multi-robot system
that aims to achieve certain sensing goals while meeting and maintaining
certain communication performance requirements, through cooperative control,
learning and adaptation. While both of the component areas, i.e., Robotics and
WSN, are very well-known and well-explored, there exist a whole set of new
opportunities and research directions at the intersection of these two fields
which are relatively or even completely unexplored. One such example would be
the use of a set of robotic routers to set up a temporary communication path
between a sender and a receiver that uses the controlled mobility to the
advantage of packet routing. We find that there exist only a limited number of
articles to be directly categorized as RWSN related works whereas there exist a
range of articles in the robotics and the WSN literature that are also relevant
to this new field of research. To connect the dots, we first identify the core
problems and research trends related to RWSN such as connectivity,
localization, routing, and robust flow of information. Next, we classify the
existing research on RWSN as well as the relevant state-of-the-arts from
robotics and WSN community according to the problems and trends identified in
the first step. Lastly, we analyze what is missing in the existing literature,
and identify topics that require more research attention in the future
Visual servoing of aerial manipulators
The final publication is available at link.springer.comThis chapter describes the classical techniques to control an aerial manipulator by means of visual information and presents an uncalibrated image-based visual servo method to drive the aerial vehicle. The proposed technique has the advantage that it contains mild assumptions about the principal point and skew values of the camera, and it does not require prior knowledge of the focal length, in contrast to traditional image-based approaches.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent
construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the
state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing
progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications,
and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey
the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto
standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad
set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric
and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees,
active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously
serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By
looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open
challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific
investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that
often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and
Is SLAM solved
Markerless visual servoing on unknown objects for humanoid robot platforms
To precisely reach for an object with a humanoid robot, it is of central
importance to have good knowledge of both end-effector, object pose and shape.
In this work we propose a framework for markerless visual servoing on unknown
objects, which is divided in four main parts: I) a least-squares minimization
problem is formulated to find the volume of the object graspable by the robot's
hand using its stereo vision; II) a recursive Bayesian filtering technique,
based on Sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) filtering, estimates the 6D pose
(position and orientation) of the robot's end-effector without the use of
markers; III) a nonlinear constrained optimization problem is formulated to
compute the desired graspable pose about the object; IV) an image-based visual
servo control commands the robot's end-effector toward the desired pose. We
demonstrate effectiveness and robustness of our approach with extensive
experiments on the iCub humanoid robot platform, achieving real-time
computation, smooth trajectories and sub-pixel precisions
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