Climbing and Walking Robots

With the advancement of technology, new exciting approaches enable us to render mobile robotic systems more versatile, robust and cost-efficient. Some researchers combine climbing and walking techniques with a modular approach, a reconfigurable approach, or a swarm approach to realize novel prototypes as flexible mobile robotic platforms featuring all necessary locomotion capabilities. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the latest wide-range achievements in climbing and walking robotic technology to researchers, scientists, and engineers throughout the world. Different aspects including control simulation, locomotion realization, methodology, and system integration are presented from the scientific and from the technical point of view. This book consists of two main parts, one dealing with walking robots, the second with climbing robots. The content is also grouped by theoretical research and applicative realization. Every chapter offers a considerable amount of interesting and useful information

Ground Robotic Hand Applications for the Space Program study (GRASP)

This document reports on a NASA-STDP effort to address research interests of the NASA Kennedy Space Center (KSC) through a study entitled, Ground Robotic-Hand Applications for the Space Program (GRASP). The primary objective of the GRASP study was to identify beneficial applications of specialized end-effectors and robotic hand devices for automating any ground operations which are performed at the Kennedy Space Center. Thus, operations for expendable vehicles, the Space Shuttle and its components, and all payloads were included in the study. Typical benefits of automating operations, or augmenting human operators performing physical tasks, include: reduced costs; enhanced safety and reliability; and reduced processing turnaround time

Research on a semiautonomous mobile robot for loosely structured environments focused on transporting mail trolleys

In this thesis is presented a novel approach to model, control, and planning the motion of a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot that applies stable pushes and pulls to a nonholonomic cart (York mail trolley) in a loosely structured environment. The method is based on grasping and ungrasping the nonholonomic cart, as a result, the robot changes its kinematics properties. In consequence, two robot configurations are produced by the task of grasping and ungrasping the load, they are: the single-robot configuration and the robot-trolley configuration. Furthermore, in order to comply with the general planar motion law of rigid bodies and the kinematic constraints imposed by the robot wheels for each configuration, the robot has been provided with two motorized steerable wheels in order to have a flexible platform able to adapt to these restrictions. [Continues.

Towards gestural understanding for intelligent robots

Fritsch JN. Towards gestural understanding for intelligent robots. Bielefeld: Universität Bielefeld; 2012.A strong driving force of scientific progress in the technical sciences is the quest for systems that assist humans in their daily life and make their life easier and more enjoyable. Nowadays smartphones are probably the most typical instances of such systems. Another class of systems that is getting increasing attention are intelligent robots. Instead of offering a smartphone touch screen to select actions, these systems are intended to offer a more natural human-machine interface to their users. Out of the large range of actions performed by humans, gestures performed with the hands play a very important role especially when humans interact with their direct surrounding like, e.g., pointing to an object or manipulating it. Consequently, a robot has to understand such gestures to offer an intuitive interface. Gestural understanding is, therefore, a key capability on the way to intelligent robots. This book deals with vision-based approaches for gestural understanding. Over the past two decades, this has been an intensive field of research which has resulted in a variety of algorithms to analyze human hand motions. Following a categorization of different gesture types and a review of other sensing techniques, the design of vision systems that achieve hand gesture understanding for intelligent robots is analyzed. For each of the individual algorithmic steps – hand detection, hand tracking, and trajectory-based gesture recognition – a separate Chapter introduces common techniques and algorithms and provides example methods. The resulting recognition algorithms are considering gestures in isolation and are often not sufficient for interacting with a robot who can only understand such gestures when incorporating the context like, e.g., what object was pointed at or manipulated. Going beyond a purely trajectory-based gesture recognition by incorporating context is an important prerequisite to achieve gesture understanding and is addressed explicitly in a separate Chapter of this book. Two types of context, user-provided context and situational context, are reviewed and existing approaches to incorporate context for gestural understanding are reviewed. Example approaches for both context types provide a deeper algorithmic insight into this field of research. An overview of recent robots capable of gesture recognition and understanding summarizes the currently realized human-robot interaction quality. The approaches for gesture understanding covered in this book are manually designed while humans learn to recognize gestures automatically during growing up. Promising research targeted at analyzing developmental learning in children in order to mimic this capability in technical systems is highlighted in the last Chapter completing this book as this research direction may be highly influential for creating future gesture understanding systems

Design and Control of Robotic Systems for Lower Limb Stroke Rehabilitation

Lower extremity stroke rehabilitation exhausts considerable health care resources, is labor intensive, and provides mostly qualitative metrics of patient recovery. To overcome these issues, robots can assist patients in physically manipulating their affected limb and measure the output motion. The robots that have been currently designed, however, provide assistance over a limited set of training motions, are not portable for in-home and in-clinic use, have high cost and may not provide sufficient safety or performance. This thesis proposes the idea of incorporating a mobile drive base into lower extremity rehabilitation robots to create a portable, inherently safe system that provides assistance over a wide range of training motions. A set of rehabilitative motion tasks were established and a six-degree-of-freedom (DOF) motion and force-sensing system was designed to meet high-power, large workspace, and affordability requirements. An admittance controller was implemented, and the feasibility of using this portable, low-cost system for movement assistance was shown through tests on a healthy individual. An improved version of the robot was then developed that added torque sensing and known joint elasticity for use in future clinical testing with a flexible-joint impedance controller

Mechatronic Systems

Mechatronics, the synergistic blend of mechanics, electronics, and computer science, has evolved over the past twenty five years, leading to a novel stage of engineering design. By integrating the best design practices with the most advanced technologies, mechatronics aims at realizing high-quality products, guaranteeing at the same time a substantial reduction of time and costs of manufacturing. Mechatronic systems are manifold and range from machine components, motion generators, and power producing machines to more complex devices, such as robotic systems and transportation vehicles. With its twenty chapters, which collect contributions from many researchers worldwide, this book provides an excellent survey of recent work in the field of mechatronics with applications in various fields, like robotics, medical and assistive technology, human-machine interaction, unmanned vehicles, manufacturing, and education. We would like to thank all the authors who have invested a great deal of time to write such interesting chapters, which we are sure will be valuable to the readers. Chapters 1 to 6 deal with applications of mechatronics for the development of robotic systems. Medical and assistive technologies and human-machine interaction systems are the topic of chapters 7 to 13.Chapters 14 and 15 concern mechatronic systems for autonomous vehicles. Chapters 16-19 deal with mechatronics in manufacturing contexts. Chapter 20 concludes the book, describing a method for the installation of mechatronics education in schools

Oncilla robot: a versatile open-source quadruped research robot with compliant pantograph legs

We present Oncilla robot, a novel mobile, quadruped legged locomotion machine. This large-cat sized, 5.1 robot is one of a kind of a recent, bioinspired legged robot class designed with the capability of model-free locomotion control. Animal legged locomotion in rough terrain is clearly shaped by sensor feedback systems. Results with Oncilla robot show that agile and versatile locomotion is possible without sensory signals to some extend, and tracking becomes robust when feedback control is added (Ajaoolleian 2015). By incorporating mechanical and control blueprints inspired from animals, and by observing the resulting robot locomotion characteristics, we aim to understand the contribution of individual components. Legged robots have a wide mechanical and control design parameter space, and a unique potential as research tools to investigate principles of biomechanics and legged locomotion control. But the hardware and controller design can be a steep initial hurdle for academic research. To facilitate the easy start and development of legged robots, Oncilla-robot's blueprints are available through open-source. [...