Strategic creation and placement of landmarks for Robot navigation in a partially - known environment

Navigation of autonomous robots in uncharted or uncertain, and constrained or hazardous environment is a common problem but integrated with multiple challenges. This paper considers a subsection of such an environment and essays a feasible yet innovative solution for accurate parking and obstacle avoidance of a car-like mobile robot. The new method is based on strategic creation and positioning of landmarks in a bounded workspace that will aid or guide the robot to safely navigate the workspace and finally park correctly inside of the designated parking bay. By autonomously controlling its translational velocity and the steering angle, the car-like robot navigates from one (newly fixed) landmark to another (newly fixed) and finally converges to a target with a pre-defined posture. Attaining accurate posture is very important in real-life situations which involve tasks such as loading or off-loading and deliveries in constrained spaces. The paper establishes practical posture stability of the system. The computer simulations verify the effectiveness of the proposed method and the proposed control inputs

Switch controllers of an n - link revolute manipulator with a prismatic end effector for landmark navigation

Robotic arms play an indispensable role in multiple sectors such as manufacturing, transportation and healthcare to improve human livelihoods and make possible their endeavors and innovations, which further enhance the quality of our lives. This paper considers such a robotic arm comprised of n revolute links and a prismatic end-effector, where the articulated arm is anchored in a restricted workspace. A new set of stabilizing switched velocity-based continuous controllers was derived using the Lyapunov-based Control Scheme (LbCS) from the category of classical approaches where switching of these nonlinear controllers is invoked by a new rule. The switched controllers enable the end-effector of the robotic arm to navigate autonomously via a series of landmarks, known as hierarchal landmarks, and finally converge to its equilibrium state. The interaction of the inherent attributes of LbCS that are the safeness, shortness and smoothness of paths for motion planning bring about cost and time efficiency of the controllers. The stability of the switched system was proven using Branicky’s stability criteria for switched systems based on multiple Lyapunov functions and was numerically validated using the RK4 method (Runge–Kutta method). Finally, computer simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the continuous time-invariant velocity-based controllers

Advances in Robot Kinematics : Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Advances in Robot Kinematics

International audienceThe motion of mechanisms, kinematics, is one of the most fundamental aspect of robot design, analysis and control but is also relevant to other scientific domains such as biome- chanics, molecular biology, . . . . The series of books on Advances in Robot Kinematics (ARK) report the latest achievement in this field. ARK has a long history as the first book was published in 1991 and since then new issues have been published every 2 years. Each book is the follow-up of a single-track symposium in which the participants exchange their results and opinions in a meeting that bring together the best of world’s researchers and scientists together with young students. Since 1992 the ARK symposia have come under the patronage of the International Federation for the Promotion of Machine Science-IFToMM.This book is the 13th in the series and is the result of peer-review process intended to select the newest and most original achievements in this field. For the first time the articles of this symposium will be published in a green open-access archive to favor free dissemination of the results. However the book will also be o↵ered as a on-demand printed book.The papers proposed in this book show that robot kinematics is an exciting domain with an immense number of research challenges that go well beyond the field of robotics.The last symposium related with this book was organized by the French National Re- search Institute in Computer Science and Control Theory (INRIA) in Grasse, France