Internet of robotic things : converging sensing/actuating, hypoconnectivity, artificial intelligence and IoT Platforms

The Internet of Things (IoT) concept is evolving rapidly and influencing newdevelopments in various application domains, such as the Internet of MobileThings (IoMT), Autonomous Internet of Things (A-IoT), Autonomous Systemof Things (ASoT), Internet of Autonomous Things (IoAT), Internetof Things Clouds (IoT-C) and the Internet of Robotic Things (IoRT) etc.that are progressing/advancing by using IoT technology. The IoT influencerepresents new development and deployment challenges in different areassuch as seamless platform integration, context based cognitive network integration,new mobile sensor/actuator network paradigms, things identification(addressing, naming in IoT) and dynamic things discoverability and manyothers. The IoRT represents new convergence challenges and their need to be addressed, in one side the programmability and the communication ofmultiple heterogeneous mobile/autonomous/robotic things for cooperating,their coordination, configuration, exchange of information, security, safetyand protection. Developments in IoT heterogeneous parallel processing/communication and dynamic systems based on parallelism and concurrencyrequire new ideas for integrating the intelligent “devices”, collaborativerobots (COBOTS), into IoT applications. Dynamic maintainability, selfhealing,self-repair of resources, changing resource state, (re-) configurationand context based IoT systems for service implementation and integrationwith IoT network service composition are of paramount importance whennew “cognitive devices” are becoming active participants in IoT applications.This chapter aims to be an overview of the IoRT concept, technologies,architectures and applications and to provide a comprehensive coverage offuture challenges, developments and applications

Robotic Manipulation of Environmentally Constrained Objects Using Underactuated Hands

Robotics for agriculture represents the ultimate application of one of our society\u27s latest and most advanced innovations to its most ancient and vital industry. Over the course of history, mechanization and automation have increased crop output several orders of magnitude, enabling a geometric growth in population and an increase in quality of life across the globe. As a challenging step, manipulating objects in harvesting automation is still under investigation in literature. Harvesting or the process of gathering ripe crops can be described as breaking environmentally constrained objects into two or more pieces at the desired locations. In this thesis, the problem of purposefully failing (breaking) or yielding objects by a robotic gripper is investigated. A failure task is first formulated using mechanical failure theories. Next, a grasp quality measure is presented to characterize a suitable grasp configuration and systematically control the failure behavior of the object. This approach combines the failure task and the capability of the gripper for wrench insertion. The friction between the object and the gripper is used to formulate the capability of the gripper for wrench insertion. A new method inspired by the human pre-manipulation process is introduced to utilize the gripper itself as the measurement tool and obtain a friction model. The developed friction model is capable of capturing the anisotropic behavior of materials which is the case for most fruits and vegetables.The limited operating space for harvesting process, the vulnerability of agricultural products and clusters of crops demand strict conditions for the manipulation process. This thesis presents a new sensorized underactuated self-adaptive finger to address the stringent conditions in the agricultural environment. This design incorporates link-driven underactuated mechanism with an embedded load cell for contact force measurement and a trimmer potentiometer for acquiring joint variables. The integration of these sensors results in tactile-like sensations in the finger without compromising the size and complexity of the proposed design. To obtain an optimum finger design, the placement of the load cell is analyzed using Finite Element Method (FEM). The design of the finger features a particular round shape of the distal phalanx and specific size ratio between the phalanxes to enable both precision and power grasps. A quantitative evaluation of the grasp efficiency by constructing a grasp wrench space is also provided. The effectiveness of the proposed designs and theories are verified through real-time experiments. For conducting the experiments in real-time, a software/hardware platform capable of dataset management is crucial. In this thesis, a new comprehensive software interface for integration of industrial robots with peripheral tools and sensors is designed and developed. This software provides a real-time low-level access to the manipulator controller. Furthermore, Data Acquisition boards are integrated into the software which enables Rapid Prototyping methods. Additionally, Hardware-in-the-loop techniques can be implemented by adding the complexity of the plant under control to the test platform. The software is a collection of features developed and distributed under GPL V3.0

21st century manufacturing machines: Design, fabrication and controls

Advances in nanotechnology, microfabrication and new manufacturing processes, the revolution of open electronics, and the emerging internet of things will influence the design, manufacture, and control of manufacturing machines in the future. For instance, miniaturization will change manufacturing processes; additive and rapid prototyping will change the production of machine components; and open electronics offer a platform for new control architectures for manufacturing systems that are open, modular, and easy to reconfigure. Combined with the latest trends in cyber-physical systems and the internet of things, open architecture controllers for CNC systems can become platforms, oriented for numerical control as a service (NCaaS) and manufacturing as a service, tailored to the creation of cyber-manufacturing networks of shared resources and web applications. With this potential in mind, this research presents new design-for-fabrication methodologies and control strategies to facilitate the creation of next generation machine tools. It provides a discussion and examples of the opportunities that the present moment offers. The first portion of this dissertation focuses on the design of complex 3D MEMS machines realized from conventional 2.5D microfabrication processes. It presents an analysis of an example XYZ-MEMS parallel kinematics stage as well as of designs of the individual components of the manipulator, integrated into a design approach for PK-XYZ-MEMS stages. It seems likely that this design-for-fabrication methodology will enable higher functionality in MEMS micromachines and result in new devices that interact, in three full dimensions, with their surroundings. Novel and innovative research exemplifies the opportunities new and economical manufacturing technologies offer for the design and fabrication of modern machine tools. The second portion of this dissertation describes the demonstration of a new flexural joint designed with both traditional and additive manufacturing processes. It extrapolates principles based on the design of this joint that alleviate the effects of low accuracy and poor surface finishing, anisotropy, reductions in material properties of components, and small holding forces. Based on these results, the next section presents case examples of the construction of mesoscale devices and machine components using multilayered composites and hybrid flexures for precision engineering, medical training, and machine tools for reduced life applications and tests design-for-fabrication strategies. The results suggest the strategies effectively address existing problems, providing a repertory of creative solutions applicable to the design of devices with hybrid flexures. The implications for medical industry, micro robotics, soft robotics, flexible electronics, and metrology systems are positive. Chapter number five examines to positive impact of open architectures of control for CNC systems, given the current availability of micro-processing power and open-source electronics. It presents a new modular architecture controller based on open-source electronics. This component-based approach offers the possibility of adding micro-processing units and an axis of motion without modification of the control programs. This kind of software and hardware modularity is important for the reconfiguration of new manufacturing units. The flexibility of this architecture makes it a convenient testbed for the implementation of new control algorithms on different electromechanical systems. This research provides general purpose, open architecture for the design of a CNC system based on open electronics and detailed information to experiment with these platforms. This dissertation’s final chapter describes how applying the latest trends to the classical concepts of modular and open architecture controllers for CNC systems results in a control platform, oriented for numerical control as a service (NCaaS) and manufacturing as a service (MaaS), tailored to the creation of cyber-manufacturing networks of shared resources and web applications. Based on this technology, this chapter introduces new manufacturing network for numerical control (NC) infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the internet. The proposed network architecture has a hardware, a virtualization, an operating system, and a network layer. With a new operating system necessary to service and virtualize manufacturing resources, and a micro service architecture of manufacturing nodes and assets, this network is a new paradigm in cloud manufacturing

Advanced Strategies for Robot Manipulators

Amongst the robotic systems, robot manipulators have proven themselves to be of increasing importance and are widely adopted to substitute for human in repetitive and/or hazardous tasks. Modern manipulators are designed complicatedly and need to do more precise, crucial and critical tasks. So, the simple traditional control methods cannot be efficient, and advanced control strategies with considering special constraints are needed to establish. In spite of the fact that groundbreaking researches have been carried out in this realm until now, there are still many novel aspects which have to be explored

Progettazione e Controllo di Mani Robotiche

The application of dexterous robotic hands out of research laboratories has been limited by the intrinsic complexity that these devices present. This is directly reflected as an economically unreasonable cost and a low overall reliability. Within the research reported in this thesis it is shown how the problem of complexity in the design of robotic hands can be tackled, taking advantage of modern technologies (i.e. rapid prototyping), leading to innovative concepts for the design of the mechanical structure, the actuation and sensory systems. The solutions adopted drastically reduce the prototyping and production costs and increase the reliability, reducing the number of parts required and averaging their single reliability factors. In order to get guidelines for the design process, the problem of robotic grasp and manipulation by a dual arm/hand system has been reviewed. In this way, the requirements that should be fulfilled at hardware level to guarantee successful execution of the task has been highlighted. The contribution of this research from the manipulation planning side focuses on the redundancy resolution that arise in the execution of the task in a dexterous arm/hand system. In literature the problem of coordination of arm and hand during manipulation of an object has been widely analyzed in theory but often experimentally demonstrated in simplified robotic setup. Our aim is to cover the lack in the study of this topic and experimentally evaluate it in a complex system as a anthropomorphic arm hand system

FPGAs in Industrial Control Applications

The aim of this paper is to review the state-of-the-art of Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) technologies and their contribution to industrial control applications. Authors start by addressing various research fields which can exploit the advantages of FPGAs. The features of these devices are then presented, followed by their corresponding design tools. To illustrate the benefits of using FPGAs in the case of complex control applications, a sensorless motor controller has been treated. This controller is based on the Extended Kalman Filter. Its development has been made according to a dedicated design methodology, which is also discussed. The use of FPGAs to implement artificial intelligence-based industrial controllers is then briefly reviewed. The final section presents two short case studies of Neural Network control systems designs targeting FPGAs

A model-based approach to robot kinematics and control using discrete factor graphs with belief propagation

Much of recent researches in robotics have shifted the focus from traditionally-specific industrial tasks to investigations of new types of robots with alternative ways of controlling them. In this paper, we describe the development of a generic method based on factor graphs to model robot kinematics. We focused on the kinematics aspect of robot control because it provides a fast and systematic solution for the robot agent to move in a dynamic environment. We developed neurally-inspired factor graph models that can be applied on two different robotic systems: a mobile platform and a robotic arm. We also demonstrated that we can extend the static model of the robotic arm into a dynamic model useful for imitating natural movements of a human hand. We tested our methods in a simulation environment as well as in scenarios involving real robots. The experimental results proved the flexibility of our proposed methods in terms of remodeling and learning, which enabled the modeled robot to perform reliably during the execution of given tasks