Novel infinitely Variable Transmission allowing efficient transmission ratio variations at rest

Recent studies showed that Continuously Variable Transmissions (CVT) and Infinitely Variable Transmissions (IVT) can considerably improve the locomotion efficiency in legged robot. A CVT is a transmission whose ratio can be continuously varied and an IVT is a transmission whose ratio can be continuously varied from positive to negative values. However, efficient use of such transmissions in walking applications requires changing the transmission ratio at a minimal energy cost, even at rest, i.e. when the input shaft is not rotating. This contribution proposes a novel CVT and IVT principle which can achieve such ratio variations at rest. The presented CVT is a modified planetary gear, whose planets are conical and mounted on inclined shafts, and whose ring is made of contiguous diabolo-shaped rollers. This configuration enables the control of the transmission ratio by adjusting the point of contact between the cones and rollers that comprise the ring. A traditional planetary gear system can be added to the CVT to form an IVT

Human-Machine Interface for Tele-Robotic Operation: Mapping of Tongue Movements Based on Aural Flow Monitoring

2004 IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), October, 2004 (Awarded “Best Paper in Conference”

Online Visual Robot Tracking and Identification using Deep LSTM Networks

Collaborative robots working on a common task are necessary for many applications. One of the challenges for achieving collaboration in a team of robots is mutual tracking and identification. We present a novel pipeline for online visionbased detection, tracking and identification of robots with a known and identical appearance. Our method runs in realtime on the limited hardware of the observer robot. Unlike previous works addressing robot tracking and identification, we use a data-driven approach based on recurrent neural networks to learn relations between sequential inputs and outputs. We formulate the data association problem as multiple classification problems. A deep LSTM network was trained on a simulated dataset and fine-tuned on small set of real data. Experiments on two challenging datasets, one synthetic and one real, which include long-term occlusions, show promising results.Comment: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), Vancouver, Canada, 2017. IROS RoboCup Best Paper Awar

Active Boundary Component Models for Robotic Dressing Assistance

Twardon L, Ritter H. Active Boundary Component Models for Robotic Dressing Assistance. In: 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). Piscataway, NJ: IEEE; 2016: 2811-2818

Distinguishing sliding from slipping during object pushing

Meier M, Walck G, Haschke R, Ritter H. Distinguishing sliding from slipping during object pushing. In: Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS), 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on. IEEE; 2016

Learning How a Tool Affords by Simulating 3D Models from the Web

Thanks to: UoAs ABVenture Zone, N. Petkov, K. Georgiev, B. Nougier, S. Fichtl, S. Ramamoorthy, M. Beetz, A. Haidu, J. Alexander, M. Schoeler, N. Pugeault, D. Cruickshank, M. Chung and N. Khan. Paulo Abelha is on a PhD studentship supported by the Brazilian agency CAPES through the program Science without Borders. Frank Guerin received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. Published in: 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) DOI: 10.1109/IROS.2017.8206372 Date of Conference: 24-28 Sept. 2017 Conference Location: Vancouver, BC, Canada.Postprin

Time-optimal Coordination of Mobile Robots along Specified Paths

In this paper, we address the problem of time-optimal coordination of mobile robots under kinodynamic constraints along specified paths. We propose a novel approach based on time discretization that leads to a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) formulation. This problem can be solved using general-purpose MILP solvers in a reasonable time, resulting in a resolution-optimal solution. Moreover, unlike previous work found in the literature, our formulation allows an exact linear modeling (up to the discretization resolution) of second-order dynamic constraints. Extensive simulations are performed to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.Comment: Published in 2016 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS

Passive Compliance Control of Aerial Manipulators

This paper presents a passive compliance control for aerial manipulators to achieve stable environmental interactions. The main challenge is the absence of actuation along body-planar directions of the aerial vehicle which might be required during the interaction to preserve passivity. The controller proposed in this paper guarantees passivity of the manipulator through a proper choice of end-effector coordinates, and that of vehicle fuselage is guaranteed by exploiting time domain passivity technique. Simulation studies validate the proposed approach.Comment: IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 201

Online regeneration of bipedal walking gait pattern optimizing footstep placement and timing

Kryczka P, Kormushev P, Tsagarakis NG, Caldwell DG. Online regeneration of bipedal walking gait pattern optimizing footstep placement and timing. In: 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers (IEEE); 2015