Progress and Prospects of the Human-Robot Collaboration

International audienceRecent technological advances in hardware designof the robotic platforms enabled the implementationof various control modalities for improved interactions withhumans and unstructured environments. An important applicationarea for the integration of robots with such advancedinteraction capabilities is human-robot collaboration. Thisaspect represents high socio-economic impacts and maintainsthe sense of purpose of the involved people, as the robotsdo not completely replace the humans from the workprocess. The research community’s recent surge of interestin this area has been devoted to the implementation of variousmethodologies to achieve intuitive and seamless humanrobot-environment interactions by incorporating the collaborativepartners’ superior capabilities, e.g. human’s cognitiveand robot’s physical power generation capacity. In fact,the main purpose of this paper is to review the state-of-thearton intermediate human-robot interfaces (bi-directional),robot control modalities, system stability, benchmarking andrelevant use cases, and to extend views on the required futuredevelopments in the realm of human-robot collaboration

Visual Neuroscience of Robotic Grasping

Supporting Informatio

Robot interaction control using force and vision

The problem of interaction control of a robot manipulator with a partially known environment is considered. The environment is a rigid object of known geometry but of unknown and possibly time varying position and orientation. An algorithm for online estimation of the object pose is presented, based on visual data provided by a camera. The estimation accuracy is improved during the interaction by using also force and joint position measurements. The proposed method can be exploited to implement any kind of interaction control strategy. A simulation case study is considered for the case of impedance control of a robot manipulator in contact with a planar surface. © 2006 IEEE

Human-Robot Interaction Control Using Force and Vision

The extension of application domains of robotics from factories to human environments leads to implementing proper strategies for close interaction between people and robots. In order to avoid dangerous collision, force and vision based control can be used, while tracking human motion during such interaction. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007

Preface to Advances in Control Theory and Applications

The preface refers to the presentations of research results as well as informal discussions about ideas and problems, case-studies, limitations and potentials of existing and emerging theories during the “meeting-in-the-fortress” organized in Bertinoro, Italy, by the “CASY-Centre of Research on Complex Automated Systems” of the University of Bologna, during the week May 22-26, 2006. This workshop enjoyed the participation of Frank Allgower, Karl Astrom,Tamer Basar, Claudio Bonivento, Marco Campi, Tryphon Georgiou, Alessandro Giua, Lino Guzzella, Alberto Isidori, Arthur Krener, Stéphane Lafortune, Lorenzo Marconi, Manfred Morari, Steve Morse, Anibal Ollero, Laurent Praly, Anders Rantzer, Giorgio Rizzoni, Carlo Rossi, Kurt Schlacher, Bruno Siciliano, Marcel Staroswiecki, Andrew Teel, Roberto Tempo, Arijan van der Schaft, Yutaka Yamamoto, Sandro Zampieri, and of a number of post doctoral fellows and PhD students currently working at CASY, http://www.casy.deis.unibo.it . Out of the twenty five lectures given in Bertinoro, fifteen are reported here in written revised form, aiming at offering the identification of new theoretical developments and research directions, as needed by recent progresses in application and problems which are still looking for a theoretical support and effective rigorous solutions. In this respect, "Advances in Control Theory and Applications" is aimed at a broad audience of PhD students, researchers and skilled professionals operating in different technical areas where control issues are relevant. The chapters deal with: Modeling and Control of Autonomous Helicopters.- Efficient Quantization in the Average Consensus Problem.- Human-Robot Interaction Control Using Force and Vision.- A Dissipation Inequality for the Minimum Phase Property of Nonlinear Control Systems.- Input Disturbance Suppression for Port-Hamiltonian Systems: an Internal Model Approach.- A Systems Theory View of Petri Nets.- Wireless Sensing with Power Constraints.- The Important State Coordinates of a Nonlinear System.- On Decentralized and Distributed Control of Partially-Observed Discrete Event Systems.- A Unifying Approach to the Design of Nonlinear Output Regulators.- Controller Design through Random Sampling: an Example.- Digital Control of High Performance Power Supplies for a Synchrotron Light Source.- Distributed PCHD-Systems, from the Lumped to the Distributed Parameter Case.- Observability and the Design of Fault Tolerant Estimation Using Structural Analysis.- Robust Hybrid Control Systems: an Overview of Some Recent Results