1,976 research outputs found
Summary report: A preliminary investigation into the use of fuzzy logic for the control of redundant manipulators
The Rice University Department of Mechanical Engineering and Materials Sciences' Robotics Group designed and built an eight degree of freedom redundant manipulator. Fuzzy logic was proposed as a control scheme for tasks not directly controlled by a human operator. In preliminary work, fuzzy logic control was implemented for a camera tracking system and a six degree of freedom manipulator. Both preliminary systems use real time vision data as input to fuzzy controllers. Related projects include integration of tactile sensing and fuzzy control of a redundant snake-like arm that is under construction
Biomimetic Manipulator Control Design for Bimanual Tasks in the Natural Environment
As robots become more prolific in the human environment, it is important that safe operational
procedures are introduced at the same time; typical robot control methods are
often very stiff to maintain good positional tracking, but this makes contact (purposeful
or accidental) with the robot dangerous. In addition, if robots are to work cooperatively
with humans, natural interaction between agents will make tasks easier to perform with
less effort and learning time. Stability of the robot is particularly important in this
situation, especially as outside forces are likely to affect the manipulator when in a close
working environment; for example, a user leaning on the arm, or task-related disturbance
at the end-effector.
Recent research has discovered the mechanisms of how humans adapt the applied force
and impedance during tasks. Studies have been performed to apply this adaptation to
robots, with promising results showing an improvement in tracking and effort reduction
over other adaptive methods. The basic algorithm is straightforward to implement,
and allows the robot to be compliant most of the time and only stiff when required by
the task. This allows the robot to work in an environment close to humans, but also
suggests that it could create a natural work interaction with a human. In addition, no
force sensor is needed, which means the algorithm can be implemented on almost any
robot.
This work develops a stable control method for bimanual robot tasks, which could also
be applied to robot-human interactive tasks. A dynamic model of the Baxter robot is
created and verified, which is then used for controller simulations. The biomimetic control
algorithm forms the basis of the controller, which is developed into a hybrid control
system to improve both task-space and joint-space control when the manipulator is disturbed
in the natural environment. Fuzzy systems are implemented to remove the need
for repetitive and time consuming parameter tuning, and also allows the controller to
actively improve performance during the task. Experimental simulations are performed,
and demonstrate how the hybrid task/joint-space controller performs better than either
of the component parts under the same conditions. The fuzzy tuning method is then applied
to the hybrid controller, which is shown to slightly improve performance as well as
automating the gain tuning process. In summary, a novel biomimetic hybrid controller
is presented, with a fuzzy mechanism to avoid the gain tuning process, finalised with a
demonstration of task-suitability in a bimanual-type situation.EPSR
An Adaptive Tool-Based Telerobot Control System
Modern telerobotics concepts seek to improve the work efficiency and quality of remote operations. The unstructured nature of typical remote operational environments makes autonomous operation of telerobotic systems difficult to achieve. Thus, human operators must always remain in the control loop for safety reasons. Remote operations involve tooling interactions with task environment. These interactions can be strong enough to promote unstable operation sometimes leading to system failures. Interestingly, manipulator/tooling dynamic interactions have not been studied in detail. This dissertation introduces a human-machine cooperative telerobotic (HMCTR) system architecture that has the ability to incorporate tooling interaction control and other computer assistance functions into the overall control system. A universal tooling interaction force prediction model has been created and implemented using grey system theory. Finally, a grey prediction force/position parallel fuzzy controller has been developed that compensates for the tooling interaction forces. Detailed experiments using a full-scale telerobotics testbed indicate: (i) the feasibility of the developed methodologies, and (ii) dramatic improvements in the stability of manipulator – based on band saw cutting operations. These results are foundational toward the further enhancement and development of telerobot
V-ANFIS for Dealing with Visual Uncertainty for Force Estimation in Robotic Surgery
Accurate and robust estimation of applied forces in Robotic-Assisted Minimally Invasive Surgery is a very challenging task. Many vision-based solutions attempt to estimate the force by measuring the surface deformation after contacting the surgical tool. However, visual uncertainty, due to tool occlusion, is a major concern and can highly affect the results' precision. In this paper, a novel design of an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference strategy with a voting step (V-ANFIS) is used to accommodate with this loss of information. Experimental results show a significant accuracy improvement from 50% to 77% with respect to other proposals.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version
Towards retrieving force feedback in robotic-assisted surgery: a supervised neuro-recurrent-vision approach
Robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgeries have gained a lot of popularity over conventional procedures as they offer many benefits to both surgeons and patients. Nonetheless, they still suffer from some limitations that affect their outcome. One of them is the lack of force feedback which restricts the surgeon's sense of touch and might reduce precision during a procedure. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel force estimation approach that combines a vision based solution with supervised learning to estimate the applied force and provide the surgeon with a suitable representation of it. The proposed solution starts with extracting the geometry of motion of the heart's surface by minimizing an energy functional to recover its 3D deformable structure. A deep network, based on a LSTM-RNN architecture, is then used to learn the relationship between the extracted visual-geometric information and the applied force, and to find accurate mapping between the two. Our proposed force estimation solution avoids the drawbacks usually associated with force sensing devices, such as biocompatibility and integration issues. We evaluate our approach on phantom and realistic tissues in which we report an average root-mean square error of 0.02 N.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft
Robot Manipulators
Robot manipulators are developing more in the direction of industrial robots than of human workers. Recently, the applications of robot manipulators are spreading their focus, for example Da Vinci as a medical robot, ASIMO as a humanoid robot and so on. There are many research topics within the field of robot manipulators, e.g. motion planning, cooperation with a human, and fusion with external sensors like vision, haptic and force, etc. Moreover, these include both technical problems in the industry and theoretical problems in the academic fields. This book is a collection of papers presenting the latest research issues from around the world
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