Towards Semi-Autonomous Control of Heavy-Duty Tracked Earth-Moving Mobile Manipulators : Use Case: The Bulldozer

A mobile manipulator (MM) comprises a manipulator attached to a mobile base, making it capable of manipulation tasks in large workspaces. In the field of construction, heavy-duty MMs are extensively used for soil excavation at construction sites. One such machine is the bulldozer, which is widely used because of its robustness and maneuverability. With its onboard blade, the bulldozer shapes terrain and transports soil material by pushing it. However, operating the blade with joysticks to accurately shape the terrain surface and moving material productively are difficult tasks that require extensive training and experience. Automating the motion of the blade, therefore, has the potential to reduce skill requirements, improve productivity, and reduce operators’ workloads. This thesis studies and develops methods for the semi-autonomous control of a bulldozer to increase surface quality and earthmoving productivity. These goals were reflected in the main research problems (RPs). Furthermore, as bulldozers drive over the terrain shape generated by the blade, the RPs are coupled because earthmoving productivity is partially dependent on surface quality. The RPs and their coupling were addressed in four publications by coordinating the mobile base and manipulator control and by using the surrounding terrain shape in automatic blade motion reference computations. Challenges to automatic control emerge from the tracked mobile platform driving on rough terrain while the manipulator tool interacts with the soil. It is shown in the first two publications that coordinating the control of the MM mobile base and blade manipulator subsystems can improve surface quality and productivity by temporarily slowing down the machine when the required manipulator joint rates increase or when the tractive performance reduces. The third publication showed that feedforward–feedback control of the blade manipulator can be used on a real-world bulldozer for accurate terrain shaping. The thesis work culminates in the final publication with an experimental implementation of a semi-autonomous blade control system that continuously maps the worksite terrain and uses it to compute the required blade motion

Contact aware robust semi-autonomous teleoperation of mobile manipulators

In the context of human-robot collaboration, cooperation and teaming, the use of mobile manipulators is widespread on applications involving unpredictable or hazardous environments for humans operators, like space operations, waste management and search and rescue on disaster scenarios. Applications where the manipulator's motion is controlled remotely by specialized operators. Teleoperation of manipulators is not a straightforward task, and in many practical cases represent a common source of failures. Common issues during the remote control of manipulators are: increasing control complexity with respect the mechanical degrees of freedom; inadequate or incomplete feedback to the user (i.e. limited visualization or knowledge of the environment); predefined motion directives may be incompatible with constraints or obstacles imposed by the environment. In the latter case, part of the manipulator may get trapped or blocked by some obstacle in the environment, failure that cannot be easily detected, isolated nor counteracted remotely. While control complexity can be reduced by the introduction of motion directives or by abstraction of the robot motion, the real-time constraint of the teleoperation task requires the transfer of the least possible amount of data over the system's network, thus limiting the number of physical sensors that can be used to model the environment. Therefore, it is of fundamental to define alternative perceptive strategies to accurately characterize different interaction with the environment without relying on specific sensory technologies. In this work, we present a novel approach for safe teleoperation, that takes advantage of model based proprioceptive measurement of the robot dynamics to robustly identify unexpected collisions or contact events with the environment. Each identified collision is translated on-the-fly into a set of local motion constraints, allowing the exploitation of the system redundancies for the computation of intelligent control laws for automatic reaction, without requiring human intervention and minimizing the disturbance of the task execution (or, equivalently, the operator efforts). More precisely, the described system consist in two different building blocks. The first, for detecting unexpected interactions with the environment (perceptive block). The second, for intelligent and autonomous reaction after the stimulus (control block). The perceptive block is responsible of the contact event identification. In short, the approach is based on the claim that a sensorless collision detection method for robot manipulators can be extended to the field of mobile manipulators, by embedding it within a statistical learning framework. The control deals with the intelligent and autonomous reaction after the contact or impact with the environment occurs, and consist on an motion abstraction controller with a prioritized set of constrains, where the highest priority correspond to the robot reconfiguration after a collision is detected; when all related dynamical effects have been compensated, the controller switch again to the basic control mode

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

Proceedings of the NASA Conference on Space Telerobotics, volume 1

The theme of the Conference was man-machine collaboration in space. Topics addressed include: redundant manipulators; man-machine systems; telerobot architecture; remote sensing and planning; navigation; neural networks; fundamental AI research; and reasoning under uncertainty

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Three-dimensional coupled dynamic analysis of deep ocean mining system

Razvijen je novi trodimenzionalno spregnuti dinamički model sustava za rudarenje u dubokom oceanu. Kopač koji se vuče po dnu napravljen je kao 3D model kompaktnog vozila s mehaničkim modelom gusjeničara s elementima u zahvatu, s kojim ne samo da se može ostvariti brza dinamička simulacija nasuprot tradicionalnom 3D modelu sastavljenom od više dijelova, već se može također omogućiti nošenje specijalnog terramehaničkog modela za talog s morskog dna. Cjevovod za kopanje izrađen je kao 3D model diskretnih elemenata s više dijelova koji je podijeljen u krute elemente povezane fleksibilnim konektorima, i može također ostvariti brzu dinamičku simulaciju za tako dugačak cjevovod. Predloženi su i simulirani novi integrirani načini iskapanja za čitav sustav koji pokazuju da se kroz cijeli postupak može dobro održati stabilno sinhronizirano djelovanje čitavog sustava. Dinamička simulacijska analiza data u radu može pružiti važnu teoretsku bazu i tehničku referencu za dizajn konstrukcije, ocjenu djelovanja i kontrolu rada praktičnog sustava iskapanja u dubokom oceanu.A new three-dimensional coupled dynamic model of the deep ocean mining system is developed. The seafloor tracked miner is built as a 3D single-body vehicle model with mesh element track-terrain interaction mechanics model, which not only can realize the fast dynamic simulation in contrast to traditional 3D multi-body model, but also can allow the loading of the seafloor sediment special terramechanics model. The mining pipeline is built as a 3D multi-body discrete element model that is divided into rigid elements linked by flexible connectors, also can realize the fast dynamic simulation for such long pipeline. New integrated mining operation modes for the total system are proposed and simulated, which show that during the whole operation processes, the synchronized stable motion of the total system can be kept well. The dynamic simulation analysis in the paper can provide important theoretical basis and technical reference for structure design, performance evaluation and operation control of the practical deep ocean mining system

Minimal distance vector. A new approach to avoid tip-over on mobile manipulators

Muchas aplicaciones de los sistemas robóticos requieren que el manipulador desarrolle operaciones mientras se encuentra sobre una plataforma móvil,situación que a diferencia de un manipulador robótico fijo, puede tener un comportamiento inestable y quedar operativamente inutilizado por volcamiento, condición última que puede ser a causa del desplazamiento del centro de gravedad del conjunto al encontrarse sobre el nivel de la plataforma de transporte por efecto del peso del manipulador. Se presenta una nueva técnica para evitar la condición de volcado por la utilización del concepto de distancia mínima entre el centro rotacional del manipulador y el arco proyectado por el centro de masa sobre el suelo de tránsito, con el objeto de modificar el centro de gravedad del conjunto por la rotación del manipulador sobre la plataforma. El objetivo final es compensar el momento rotacional a muy baja velocidad por la utilización del concepto de contra-balance por cambio de posición.Many future applications of robotics systems will  require  that  manipulators  perform  operations while  being  carried  by  moving  vehicles.  However,  different from  a  manipulator  fixed  on  the  floor,  such  a  vehicle-mounted mobile manipulator might be unstable or even tip  over,  this condition  may  be  because  the  center  of mass  is  over  the  mobile  platform  by  the manipulator’s weight.  This  paper  presents  a  new  technique  to  avoid tip-over  condition  using  the  concept  of  minimal  distance  between  the  manipulator  rotational  center  and  the projection  mass  center  arc  in  the  soil  with  the  object of modificate the gravity center of the et changing the manipulator rotational position on mobile platform, the final objective is to compensate the rotational moment at low velocity using counter-balance concept

Legged Robots for Object Manipulation: A Review

Legged robots can have a unique role in manipulating objects in dynamic, human-centric, or otherwise inaccessible environments. Although most legged robotics research to date typically focuses on traversing these challenging environments, many legged platform demonstrations have also included "moving an object" as a way of doing tangible work. Legged robots can be designed to manipulate a particular type of object (e.g., a cardboard box, a soccer ball, or a larger piece of furniture), by themselves or collaboratively. The objective of this review is to collect and learn from these examples, to both organize the work done so far in the community and highlight interesting open avenues for future work. This review categorizes existing works into four main manipulation methods: object interactions without grasping, manipulation with walking legs, dedicated non-locomotive arms, and legged teams. Each method has different design and autonomy features, which are illustrated by available examples in the literature. Based on a few simplifying assumptions, we further provide quantitative comparisons for the range of possible relative sizes of the manipulated object with respect to the robot. Taken together, these examples suggest new directions for research in legged robot manipulation, such as multifunctional limbs, terrain modeling, or learning-based control, to support a number of new deployments in challenging indoor/outdoor scenarios in warehouses/construction sites, preserved natural areas, and especially for home robotics.Comment: Preprint of the paper submitted to Frontiers in Mechanical Engineerin

Steering Behavior of an Articulated Amphibious All-Terrain Tracked Vehicle

This paper presents a study related to an Articulated Amphibious All-Terrain Tracked Vehicle (ATV) characterized by a modular architecture. The ATV is composed by two modules: The first one hosts mainly the vehicle engine and powertrain components, meanwhile the second one can be used for goods transportation, personnel carrier, crane and so on. The engine torque is transmitted to the front axle sprocket wheel of each module and finally distributed on the ground through a track mechanism. The two modules are connected through a multiaxial joint designed to guarantee four relative degrees of freedom. To steer the ATV, an Electro Hydraulic Power System (EHPS) is adopted, thus letting the vehicle steerable on any kind of terrain without a differential tracks speed. The paper aims to analyze the steady-state lateral behavior of the ATV on a flat road, through a non-linear mathematical vehicle model built in Matlab/Simulink environment. The model describes the vehicle main planar motion and the interaction between the two modules through the application of a hydraulic steering torque. The model simulates steady-state handling maneuvers in Matlab/Simulink. Two scenarios are considered: One with the application of an open-loop hydraulic steering torque without any vehicle feedback; the second one with a closed-loop steering torque actuation based on the relative angle between the two modules (hitch angle). Finally, the influence of the ATV longitudinal speed on vehicle lateral characteristics is also presented