Machine Learning Meets Advanced Robotic Manipulation

Automated industries lead to high quality production, lower manufacturing cost and better utilization of human resources. Robotic manipulator arms have major role in the automation process. However, for complex manipulation tasks, hard coding efficient and safe trajectories is challenging and time consuming. Machine learning methods have the potential to learn such controllers based on expert demonstrations. Despite promising advances, better approaches must be developed to improve safety, reliability, and efficiency of ML methods in both training and deployment phases. This survey aims to review cutting edge technologies and recent trends on ML methods applied to real-world manipulation tasks. After reviewing the related background on ML, the rest of the paper is devoted to ML applications in different domains such as industry, healthcare, agriculture, space, military, and search and rescue. The paper is closed with important research directions for future works

Physical Diagnosis and Rehabilitation Technologies

The book focuses on the diagnosis, evaluation, and assistance of gait disorders; all the papers have been contributed by research groups related to assistive robotics, instrumentations, and augmentative devices

Bibliometric Studies and Worldwide Research Trends on Global Health

Global health, conceived as a discipline, aims to train, research and respond to problems of a transboundary nature, in order to improve health and health equity at the global level. The current worldwide situation is ruled by globalization, and therefore the concept of global health involves not only health-related issues, but also those related to the environment and climate change. Therefore, in this Special Issue, the problems related to global health have been addressed from a bibliometric approach in four main areas: environmental issues, diseases, health, education and society

Smart Technologies for Precision Assembly

This open access book constitutes the refereed post-conference proceedings of the 9th IFIP WG 5.5 International Precision Assembly Seminar, IPAS 2020, held virtually in December 2020. The 16 revised full papers and 10 revised short papers presented together with 1 keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. The papers address topics such as assembly design and planning; assembly operations; assembly cells and systems; human centred assembly; and assistance methods in assembly

Improving Energy Efficiency and Motion Control in Load-Carrying Applications using Self-Contained Cylinders

Because of an increasing focus on environmental impact, including CO2 emissions and fluid spill pollution, inefficient hydraulic systems are being replaced by more environmentally friendly alternatives in several industries. For instance, in some offshore applications that have multiple diesel generators continuously running to produce electricity, all hydraulic rotating actuators supplied from a central hydraulic power unit have been replaced with AC induction motors containing a variable frequency drive and gearbox. However, hydraulic linear actuators are still needed in most load-carrying applications mainly because of their high reliability associated with external impact shocks. Moreover, their force capacity is higher than that of their linear electromechanical counterparts. Valve-controlled linear actuators (cylinders) supplied from a centralized hydraulic power unit are standard in offshore load-carrying applications. In addition to the advantages mentioned above of hydraulic linear actuators, they have, nevertheless, a number of important drawbacks, which include: 1) a high level of energy consumption due to significant power losses caused by flow throttling in both the pipelines and valves, 2) reduced motion performance due to the influence of load-holding valves, 3) high CO2 emissions and fuel costs related to the diesel generator that supplies electricity to the hydraulic power unit, 4) significant potential for hydraulic fluid leakage because of many leakage points, 5) demanding efforts with respect to installation and maintenance, as well as 6) costly piping due to the centralized hydraulic power supply. The work presented in this dissertation and the appended papers are devoted to replacing inefficient hydraulic linear actuation systems traditionally used in offshore load-carrying applications with more environmentally friendly solutions. Two alternative technologies are identified, namely electro-mechanical and electro-hydraulic self-contained cylinders. The feasibility of replacing conventional valve-controlled cylinders with self-contained cylinder concepts is investigated in two relevant case studies.publishedVersio