Collision avoidance and dynamic modeling for wheeled mobile robots and industrial manipulators

Collision Avoidance and Dynamic Modeling are key topics for researchers dealing with mobile and industrial robotics. A wide variety of algorithms, approaches and methodologies have been exploited, designed or adapted to tackle the problems of finding safe trajectories for mobile robots and industrial manipulators, and of calculating reliable dynamics models able to capture expected and possible also unexpected behaviors of robots. The knowledge of these two aspects and their potential is important to ensure the efficient and correct functioning of Industry 4.0 plants such as automated warehouses, autonomous surveillance systems and assembly lines. Collision avoidance is a crucial aspect to improve automation and safety, and to solve the problem of planning collision-free trajectories in systems composed of multiple autonomous agents such as unmanned mobile robots and manipulators with several degrees of freedom. A rigorous and accurate model explaining the dynamics of robots, is necessary to tackle tasks such as simulation, torque estimation, reduction of mechanical vibrations and design of control law

Design considerations for a reconfigurable delta robot

One project, the design of a reconfigurable Delta robot, motivated three different works which comprise this thesis. In Chapters 1-2, I discuss the application of multiobjective design principles to decide appropriate ranges of reconfigurability in a Delta robot. I show that the selection reconfigurable ranges in a system designed for multiability through continuous reconfiguration can be accomplished by generating points along an ``expanded Pareto set"-- each of these points representing a fully reconfigurable design. In Chapters 3-4 I discuss dynamically modeling compliance in a structure, and use the derivation to formulate the co-design problem for a simple pick-and-place manipulator made up of one compliant link. After displaying existing results, I discuss the current state of this research and potential next steps. Finally, in Chapter 5, I outline the practical considerations that comprised my construction of a reconfigurable Delta robot