4,670 research outputs found
Robust contact force controller for slip prevention in a robotic gripper
Grasping a soft or fragile object requires the use of minimum contact force to prevent damage or deformation. Without precise knowledge of object parameters, real-time feedback control must be used with a suitable slip sensor to regulate the contact force and prevent slip. Furthermore, the controller must be designed to have good performance characteristics to rapidly modulate the fingertip contact force in response to a slip event. In this paper, a fuzzy sliding mode controller combined with a disturbance observer is proposed for contact force control and slip prevention. The controller is based on a system model that is suitable for a wide class of robotic gripper configurations. The robustness of the controller is evaluated through both simulation and experiment. The control scheme was found to be effective and robust to parameter uncertainty. When tested on a real system, however, chattering phenomena, well known to sliding mode research, was induced by the unmodelled suboptimal components of the system (filtering, backlash, and time delays), and the controller performance was reduced
Control techniques for mechatronic assisted surgery
The treatment response for traumatic head injured patients can be improved by
using an autonomous robotic system to perform basic, time-critical emergency neurosurgery,
reducing costs and saving lives. In this thesis, a concept for a neurosurgical robotic system is proposed to perform three specific emergency neurosurgical procedures; they are the placement of an intracranial pressure monitor, external
ventricular drainage, and the evacuation of chronic subdural haematoma. The control
methods for this system are investigated following a curiosity led approach. Individual problems are interpreted in the widest sense and solutions posed that are general in nature. Three main contributions result from this approach: 1)
a clinical evidence based review of surgical robotics and a methodology to assist in their evaluation, 2) a new controller for soft-grasping of objects, and 3) new propositions and theorems for chatter suppression sliding mode controllers. These contributions directly assist in the design of the control system of the neurosurgical robot and, more broadly, impact other areas outside the narrow con nes of the target application. A methodology for applied research in surgical robotics is proposed. The methodology sets out a hierarchy of criteria consisting of three tiers, with the most important being the bottom tier and the least being the top tier. It is argued that
a robotic system must adhere to these criteria in order to achieve acceptability. Recent commercial systems are reviewed against these criteria, and are found to conform up to at least the bottom and intermediate tiers. However, the lack of
conformity to the criteria in the top tier, combined with the inability to conclusively
prove increased clinical benefit, particularly symptomatic benefit, is shown to be hampering the potential of surgical robotics in gaining wide establishment. A control scheme for soft-grasping objects is presented. Grasping a soft or fragile object requires the use of minimum contact force to prevent damage or deformation. Without precise knowledge of object parameters, real-time feedback
control must be used to regulate the contact force and prevent slip. Moreover, the controller must be designed to have good performance characteristics to rapidly modulate the fingertip contact force in response to a slip event. A fuzzy sliding mode controller combined with a disturbance observer is proposed for contact force control and slip prevention. The robustness of the controller is evaluated through
both simulation and experiment. The control scheme was found to be effective and robust to parameter uncertainty. When tested on a real system, however, chattering phenomena, well known to sliding mode research, was induced by the
unmodelled suboptimal components of the system (filtering, backlash, and time delays). This reduced the controller performance. The problem of chattering and potential solutions are explored. Real systems using sliding mode controllers, such as the control scheme for soft-grasping, have a tendency to chatter at high frequencies. This is caused by the sliding mode
controller interacting with un-modelled parasitic dynamics at the actuator-input
and sensor-output of the plant. As a result, new chatter-suppression sliding mode controllers have been developed, which introduce new parameters into the system. However, the effect any particular choice of parameters has on system performance
is unclear, and this can make tuning the parameters to meet a set of performance
criteria di cult. In this thesis, common chatter-suppression sliding mode control
strategies are surveyed and simple design and estimation methods are proposed.
The estimation methods predict convergence, chattering amplitude, settling time,
and maximum output bounds (overshoot) using harmonic linearizations and invariant
ellipsoid sets
Modeling, simulation and control of microrobots for the microfactory.
Future assembly technologies will involve higher levels of automation in order to satisfy increased microscale or nanoscale precision requirements. Traditionally, assembly using a top-down robotic approach has been well-studied and applied to the microelectronics and MEMS industries, but less so in nanotechnology. With the boom of nanotechnology since the 1990s, newly designed products with new materials, coatings, and nanoparticles are gradually entering everyone’s lives, while the industry has grown into a billion-dollar volume worldwide. Traditionally, nanotechnology products are assembled using bottom-up methods, such as self-assembly, rather than top-down robotic assembly. This is due to considerations of volume handling of large quantities of components, and the high cost associated with top-down manipulation requiring precision. However, bottom-up manufacturing methods have certain limitations, such as components needing to have predefined shapes and surface coatings, and the number of assembly components being limited to very few. For example, in the case of self-assembly of nano-cubes with an origami design, post-assembly manipulation of cubes in large quantities and cost-efficiency is still challenging. In this thesis, we envision a new paradigm for nanoscale assembly, realized with the help of a wafer-scale microfactory containing large numbers of MEMS microrobots. These robots will work together to enhance the throughput of the factory, while their cost will be reduced when compared to conventional nanopositioners. To fulfill the microfactory vision, numerous challenges related to design, power, control, and nanoscale task completion by these microrobots must be overcome. In this work, we study two classes of microrobots for the microfactory: stationary microrobots and mobile microrobots. For the stationary microrobots in our microfactory application, we have designed and modeled two different types of microrobots, the AFAM (Articulated Four Axes Microrobot) and the SolarPede. The AFAM is a millimeter-size robotic arm working as a nanomanipulator for nanoparticles with four degrees of freedom, while the SolarPede is a light-powered centimeter-size robotic conveyor in the microfactory. For mobile microrobots, we have introduced the world’s first laser-driven micrometer-size locomotor in dry environments, called ChevBot to prove the concept of the motion mechanism. The ChevBot is fabricated using MEMS technology in the cleanroom, following a microassembly step. We showed that it can perform locomotion with pulsed laser energy on a dry surface. Based on the knowledge gained with the ChevBot, we refined tits fabrication process to remove the assembly step and increase its reliability. We designed and fabricated a steerable microrobot, the SerpenBot, in order to achieve controllable behavior with the guidance of a laser beam. Through modeling and experimental study of the characteristics of this type of microrobot, we proposed and validated a new type of deep learning controller, the PID-Bayes neural network controller. The experiments showed that the SerpenBot can achieve closed-loop autonomous operation on a dry substrate
Physics-informed neural network for friction-involved nonsmooth dynamics problems
Friction-induced vibration (FIV) is very common in engineering areas.
Analysing the dynamic behaviour of systems containing a multiple-contact point
frictional interface is an important topic. However, accurately simulating
nonsmooth/discontinuous dynamic behaviour due to friction is challenging. This
paper presents a new physics-informed neural network approach for solving
nonsmooth friction-induced vibration or friction-involved vibration problems.
Compared with schemes of the conventional time-stepping methodology, in this
new computational framework, the theoretical formulations of nonsmooth
multibody dynamics are transformed and embedded in the training process of the
neural network. Major findings include that the new framework not only can
perform accurate simulation of nonsmooth dynamic behaviour, but also eliminate
the need for extremely small time steps typically associated with the
conventional time-stepping methodology for multibody systems, thus saving much
computation work while maintaining high accuracy. Specifically, four kinds of
high-accuracy PINN-based methods are proposed: (1) single PINN; (2) dual PINN;
(3) advanced single PINN; (4) advanced dual PINN. Two typical dynamics problems
with nonsmooth contact are tested: one is a 1-dimensional contact problem with
stick-slip, and the other is a 2-dimensional contact problem considering
separation-reattachment and stick-slip oscillation. Both single and dual PINN
methods show their advantages in dealing with the 1-dimensional stick-slip
problem, which outperforms conventional methods across friction models that are
difficult to simulate by the conventional time-stepping method. For the
2-dimensional problem, the capability of the advanced single and advanced dual
PINN on accuracy improvement is shown, and they provide good results even in
the cases when conventional methods fail.Comment: 38 Pages, 24 figure
Robotics 2010
Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development
Modeling, analysis and control of robot-object nonsmooth underactuated Lagrangian systems: A tutorial overview and perspectives
International audienceSo-called robot-object Lagrangian systems consist of a class of nonsmooth underactuated complementarity Lagrangian systems, with a specific structure: an "object" and a "robot". Only the robot is actuated. The object dynamics can thus be controlled only through the action of the contact Lagrange multipliers, which represent the interaction forces between the robot and the object. Juggling, walking, running, hopping machines, robotic systems that manipulate objects, tapping, pushing systems, kinematic chains with joint clearance, crawling, climbing robots, some cable-driven manipulators, and some circuits with set-valued nonsmooth components, belong this class. This article aims at presenting their main features, then many application examples which belong to the robot-object class, then reviewing the main tools and control strategies which have been proposed in the Automatic Control and in the Robotics literature. Some comments and open issues conclude the article
Study of the urban evolution of Brasilia with the use of LANDSAT data
The urban growth of Brasilia within the last ten years is analyzed with special emphasis on the utilization of remote sensing orbital data and automatic image processing. The urban spatial structure and the monitoring of its temporal changes were focused in a whole and dynamic way by the utilization of MSS-LANDSAT images for June 1973, 1978 and 1983. In order to aid data interpretation, a registration algorithm implemented at the Interactive Multispectral Image Analysis System (IMAGE-100) was utilized aiming at the overlap of multitemporal images. The utilization of suitable digital filters, combined with the images overlap, allowed a rapid identification of areas of possible urban growth and oriented the field work. The results obtained permitted an evaluation of the urban growth of Brasilia, taking as reference the proposed stated for the construction of the city
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