New Approaches in Automation and Robotics

The book New Approaches in Automation and Robotics offers in 22 chapters a collection of recent developments in automation, robotics as well as control theory. It is dedicated to researchers in science and industry, students, and practicing engineers, who wish to update and enhance their knowledge on modern methods and innovative applications. The authors and editor of this book wish to motivate people, especially under-graduate students, to get involved with the interesting field of robotics and mechatronics. We hope that the ideas and concepts presented in this book are useful for your own work and could contribute to problem solving in similar applications as well. It is clear, however, that the wide area of automation and robotics can only be highlighted at several spots but not completely covered by a single book

Robot Cartesian 3 Sumbu (X,Y,Z) Untuk Aplikasi Pengambilan dan Penempatan Benda Kerja

Labiartorium Otomasi Program Studi Teknik Elektronika Politeknik Manufaktur Negeri Bangka Belitung (Polman Babel), sejak didirikannya telah difasilitasi dengan sebuah robot cartesian merk Festo, Namun, robot ini hanya memiliki 2 sumbu (X,Y) dan tidak dapat beroperasi lagi dikarenakan kedua sensor jarak sumbu X,Y dan kontrol PLC yang digunakannya mengalami kerusakan. Untuk itu, perlu dilakukan tindakan perbaikan terhadap robot. Perbaikan robot dimaksudkan untuk mengoperasikan kembali robot cartesian tersebut sebagai bahan ajar praktikum. Agar pemanfaatannya dapat lebih maksimal untuk para mahasiswa, pada robot yang diperbaiki dilakukan modifikasi dengan tujuan agar robot dapat berkgerak secara 3 sumbu(X,Y,Z) untuk melakukan aplikasi pengambilan dan penempatan benda kerja. Adapaun peralatan yang dibutuhkan untuk modifikasi tersebut antara lain menggunakan sebuah double acting cylinder sebagai sumbu z, dengan vacuum gripper pada ujungnya untuk mencekam benda kerja, 2 buah reed switches sebagai sensor sumbu z, 3 buah sensor benda kerja, yaitu sensor optik, sensor kapasitif, dan sensor induktif, untuk proses pemilihan benda kerja agar dapar ditempatkan sesuai stasiunnya masing-masing. Untuk konrtol PLC diganti dengan IC Mikrokontroler ATMega 16L, menggunakan bahasa pemrograman CodeVisionAVR. Begitu juga sensor jarak sumbu X, Y diganti dengan sensor sumbu yang baru. Sebagai hasil pengujian dengan metode On-Off yang dilakukan, didapat bahwa robot dapat melakukan fungsi aplikasi pengambilan dan penempatan benda sesuai stasiunnya masing-masing dengan baik walaupun untuk posisi koordinat yang dicapai masih terdapat error dengan kisaran +1-+3(mm) untuk sumbu X dan +3 - +5 (mm) untuk sumbu

Mechatronics book series: robotics and automation

This book is part of the Mechatronics Book Series that contains contributions on Robotics and Automation. The book contains chapters, which can be divided into two main parts; majority of chapters related to Robotics and the remaining seven chapters on Automation. In Robotics, design and development of various types of robots and robot parts, such as biped robot, humanoid robotic hand, head and arm, fish robot, cleaning robot, snake robot and hexapod robot, are presented. Robots for numerous applications, such as robots for upper limb rehabilitation, mobile robot for tube inspection, person following robot and goal finding robot, are designed and discussed. In each of robotic related chapter, types of sensors, actuators and system integration are well studied. In Automation, applications of supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) for pipe monitoring, water treatment, distribution system are presented. Automations in landmark generation for automatic mapping system, food storage system, and that in hazardous environment are also investigated. The book provides states of the art which will be useful for graduate students, researchers and engineers as a practical guide to implementation of Mechatronics in Robotics and Automation, particularly in robot design and development, and automation applications

Experimental study of contact transition control incorporating joint acceleration feedback

Joint acceleration and velocity feedbacks are incorporated into a classical internal force control of a robot in contact with the environment. This is intended to achieve a robust contact transition and force tracking performance for varying unknown environments, without any need of adjusting the controller parameters, A unified control structure is proposed for free motion, contact transition, and constrained motion in view of the consumption of the initial kinetic energy generated by a nonzero impact velocity. The influence of the velocity and acceleration feedbacks, which are introduced especially for suppressing the transition oscillation, on the postcontact tracking performance is discussed. Extensive experiments are conducted on the third joint of a three-link direct-drive robot to verify the proposed scheme for environments of various stiffnesses, including elastic (sponge), less elastic (cardboard), and hard (steel plate) surfaces. Results are compared with those obtained by the transition control scheme without the acceleration feedback. The ability of the proposed control scheme in resisting the force disturbance during the postcontact period is also experimentally investigated

A Passivity-based Nonlinear Admittance Control with Application to Powered Upper-limb Control under Unknown Environmental Interactions

This paper presents an admittance controller based on the passivity theory for a powered upper-limb exoskeleton robot which is governed by the nonlinear equation of motion. Passivity allows us to include a human operator and environmental interaction in the control loop. The robot interacts with the human operator via F/T sensor and interacts with the environment mainly via end-effectors. Although the environmental interaction cannot be detected by any sensors (hence unknown), passivity allows us to have natural interaction. An analysis shows that the behavior of the actual system mimics that of a nominal model as the control gain goes to infinity, which implies that the proposed approach is an admittance controller. However, because the control gain cannot grow infinitely in practice, the performance limitation according to the achievable control gain is also analyzed. The result of this analysis indicates that the performance in the sense of infinite norm increases linearly with the control gain. In the experiments, the proposed properties were verified using 1 degree-of-freedom testbench, and an actual powered upper-limb exoskeleton was used to lift and maneuver the unknown payload.Comment: Accepted in IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics (T-MECH

On Advanced Mobility Concepts for Intelligent Planetary Surface Exploration

Surface exploration by wheeled rovers on Earth's Moon (the two Lunokhods) and Mars (Nasa's Sojourner and the two MERs) have been followed since many years already very suc-cessfully, specifically concerning operations over long time. However, despite of this success, the explored surface area was very small, having in mind a total driving distance of about 8 km (Spirit) and 21 km (Opportunity) over 6 years of operation. Moreover, ESA will send its ExoMars rover in 2018 to Mars, and NASA its MSL rover probably this year. However, all these rovers are lacking sufficient on-board intelligence in order to overcome longer dis-tances, driving much faster and deciding autonomously on path planning for the best trajec-tory to follow. In order to increase the scientific output of a rover mission it seems very nec-essary to explore much larger surface areas reliably in much less time. This is the main driver for a robotics institute to combine mechatronics functionalities to develop an intelligent mo-bile wheeled rover with four or six wheels, and having specific kinematics and locomotion suspension depending on the operational terrain of the rover to operate. DLR's Robotics and Mechatronics Center has a long tradition in developing advanced components in the field of light-weight motion actuation, intelligent and soft manipulation and skilled hands and tools, perception and cognition, and in increasing the autonomy of any kind of mechatronic systems. The whole design is supported and is based upon detailed modeling, optimization, and simula-tion tasks. We have developed efficient software tools to simulate the rover driveability per-formance on various terrain characteristics such as soft sandy and hard rocky terrains as well as on inclined planes, where wheel and grouser geometry plays a dominant role. Moreover, rover optimization is performed to support the best engineering intuitions, that will optimize structural and geometric parameters, compare various kinematics suspension concepts, and make use of realistic cost functions like mass and consumed energy minimization, static sta-bility, and more. For self-localization and safe navigation through unknown terrain we make use of fast 3D stereo algorithms that were successfully used e.g. in unmanned air vehicle ap-plications and on terrestrial mobile systems. The advanced rover design approach is applica-ble for lunar as well as Martian surface exploration purposes. A first mobility concept ap-proach for a lunar vehicle will be presented

Automatic Romaine Heart Harvester

The Romaine Robotics Senior Design Team developed a romaine lettuce heart trimming system in partnership with a Salinas farm to address a growing labor shortage in the agricultural industry that is resulting in crops rotting in the field before they could be harvested. An automated trimmer can alleviate the most time consuming step in the cut-trim-bag harvesting process, increasing the yields of robotic cutters or the speed of existing laborer teams. Leveraging the Partner Farm’s existing trimmer architecture, which consists of a laborer loading lettuce into sprungloaded grippers that are rotated through vision and cutting systems by an indexer, the team redesigned geometry to improve the loading, gripping, and ejection stages of the system. Physical testing, hand calculations, and FEA were performed to understand acceptable grip strengths and cup design, and several wooden mockups were built to explore a new actuating linkage design for the indexer. The team manufactured, assembled, and performed verification testing on a full-size metal motorized prototype that can be incorporated with the Partner Farm’s existing cutting and vision systems. The prototype met all of the established requirements, and the farm has implemented the redesign onto their trimmer. Future work would include designing and implementing vision and cutting systems for the team’s metal prototype

Encoderless Gimbal Calibration of Dynamic Multi-Camera Clusters

Dynamic Camera Clusters (DCCs) are multi-camera systems where one or more cameras are mounted on actuated mechanisms such as a gimbal. Existing methods for DCC calibration rely on joint angle measurements to resolve the time-varying transformation between the dynamic and static camera. This information is usually provided by motor encoders, however, joint angle measurements are not always readily available on off-the-shelf mechanisms. In this paper, we present an encoderless approach for DCC calibration which simultaneously estimates the kinematic parameters of the transformation chain as well as the unknown joint angles. We also demonstrate the integration of an encoderless gimbal mechanism with a state-of-the art VIO algorithm, and show the extensions required in order to perform simultaneous online estimation of the joint angles and vehicle localization state. The proposed calibration approach is validated both in simulation and on a physical DCC composed of a 2-DOF gimbal mounted on a UAV. Finally, we show the experimental results of the calibrated mechanism integrated into the OKVIS VIO package, and demonstrate successful online joint angle estimation while maintaining localization accuracy that is comparable to a standard static multi-camera configuration.Comment: ICRA 201

Choosing new ways to chew

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