Climbing and Walking Robots

Nowadays robotics is one of the most dynamic fields of scientific researches. The shift of robotics researches from manufacturing to services applications is clear. During the last decades interest in studying climbing and walking robots has been increased. This increasing interest has been in many areas that most important ones of them are: mechanics, electronics, medical engineering, cybernetics, controls, and computers. Today’s climbing and walking robots are a combination of manipulative, perceptive, communicative, and cognitive abilities and they are capable of performing many tasks in industrial and non- industrial environments. Surveillance, planetary exploration, emergence rescue operations, reconnaissance, petrochemical applications, construction, entertainment, personal services, intervention in severe environments, transportation, medical and etc are some applications from a very diverse application fields of climbing and walking robots. By great progress in this area of robotics it is anticipated that next generation climbing and walking robots will enhance lives and will change the way the human works, thinks and makes decisions. This book presents the state of the art achievments, recent developments, applications and future challenges of climbing and walking robots. These are presented in 24 chapters by authors throughtot the world The book serves as a reference especially for the researchers who are interested in mobile robots. It also is useful for industrial engineers and graduate students in advanced study

Climbing and Walking Robots

With the advancement of technology, new exciting approaches enable us to render mobile robotic systems more versatile, robust and cost-efficient. Some researchers combine climbing and walking techniques with a modular approach, a reconfigurable approach, or a swarm approach to realize novel prototypes as flexible mobile robotic platforms featuring all necessary locomotion capabilities. The purpose of this book is to provide an overview of the latest wide-range achievements in climbing and walking robotic technology to researchers, scientists, and engineers throughout the world. Different aspects including control simulation, locomotion realization, methodology, and system integration are presented from the scientific and from the technical point of view. This book consists of two main parts, one dealing with walking robots, the second with climbing robots. The content is also grouped by theoretical research and applicative realization. Every chapter offers a considerable amount of interesting and useful information

INSPIRE Newsletter Fall 2022

https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/inspire-newsletters/1011/thumbnail.jp

A New Coastal Crawler Prototype to Expand the Ecological Monitoring Radius of OBSEA Cabled Observatory

The use of marine cabled video observatories with multiparametric environmental data collection capability is becoming relevant for ecological monitoring strategies. Their ecosystem surveying can be enforced in real time, remotely, and continuously, over consecutive days, seasons, and even years. Unfortunately, as most observatories perform such monitoring with fixed cameras, the ecological value of their data is limited to a narrow field of view, possibly not representative of the local habitat heterogeneity. Docked mobile robotic platforms could be used to extend data collection to larger, and hence more ecologically representative areas. Among the various state-of-the-art underwater robotic platforms available, benthic crawlers are excellent candidates to perform ecological monitoring tasks in combination with cabled observatories. Although they are normally used in the deep sea, their high positioning stability, low acoustic signature, and low energetic consumption, especially during stationary phases, make them suitable for coastal operations. In this paper, we present the integration of a benthic crawler into a coastal cabled observatory (OBSEA) to extend its monitoring radius and collect more ecologically representative data. The extension of the monitoring radius was obtained by remotely operating the crawler to enforce back-and-forth drives along specific transects while recording videos with the onboard cameras. The ecological relevance of the monitoring-radius extension was demonstrated by performing a visual census of the species observed with the crawler’s cameras in comparison to the observatory’s fixed cameras, revealing non-negligible differences. Additionally, the videos recorded from the crawler’s cameras during the transects were used to demonstrate an automated photo-mosaic of the seabed for the first time on this class of vehicles. In the present work, the crawler travelled in an area of 40 m away from the OBSEA, producing an extension of the monitoring field of view (FOV), and covering an area approximately 230 times larger than OBSEA’s camera. The analysis of the videos obtained from the crawler’s and the observatory’s cameras revealed differences in the species observed. Future implementation scenarios are also discussed in relation to mission autonomy to perform imaging across spatial heterogeneity gradients around the OBSEA

A Review of Locomotion Systems for Capsule Endoscopy

Wireless capsule endoscopy for gastrointestinal (GI) tract is a modern technology that has the potential to replace conventional endoscopy techniques. Capsule endoscopy is a pill-shaped device embedded with a camera, a coin battery, and a data transfer. Without a locomotion system, this capsule endoscopy can only passively travel inside the GI tract via natural peristalsis, thus causing several disadvantages such as inability to control and stop, and risk of capsule retention. Therefore, a locomotion system needs to be added to optimize the current capsule endoscopy. This review summarizes the state-of-the-art locomotion methods along with the desired locomotion features such as size, speed, power, and temperature and compares the properties of different methods. In addition, properties and motility mechanisms of the GI tract are described. The main purpose of this review is to understand the features of GI tract and diverse locomotion methods in order to create a future capsule endoscopy compatible with GI tract properties

Robotics 2010

Without a doubt, robotics has made an incredible progress over the last decades. The vision of developing, designing and creating technical systems that help humans to achieve hard and complex tasks, has intelligently led to an incredible variety of solutions. There are barely technical fields that could exhibit more interdisciplinary interconnections like robotics. This fact is generated by highly complex challenges imposed by robotic systems, especially the requirement on intelligent and autonomous operation. This book tries to give an insight into the evolutionary process that takes place in robotics. It provides articles covering a wide range of this exciting area. The progress of technical challenges and concepts may illuminate the relationship between developments that seem to be completely different at first sight. The robotics remains an exciting scientific and engineering field. The community looks optimistically ahead and also looks forward for the future challenges and new development

Microrobots for wafer scale microfactory: design fabrication integration and control.

Future assembly technologies will involve higher automation levels, in order to satisfy increased micro scale or nano scale precision requirements. Traditionally, assembly using a top-down robotic approach has been well-studied and applied to micro-electronics and MEMS industries, but less so in nanotechnology. With the bloom of nanotechnology ever since the 1990s, newly designed products with new materials, coatings and nanoparticles are gradually entering everyone’s life, while the industry has grown into a billion-dollar volume worldwide. Traditionally, nanotechnology products are assembled using bottom-up methods, such as self-assembly, rather than with top-down robotic assembly. This is due to considerations of volume handling of large quantities of components, and the high cost associated to top-down manipulation with the required precision. However, the bottom-up manufacturing methods have certain limitations, such as components need to have pre-define shapes and surface coatings, and the number of assembly components is limited to very few. For example, in the case of self-assembly of nano-cubes with origami design, post-assembly manipulation of cubes in large quantities and cost-efficiency is still challenging. In this thesis, we envision a new paradigm for nano scale assembly, realized with the help of a wafer-scale microfactory containing large numbers of MEMS microrobots. These robots will work together to enhance the throughput of the factory, while their cost will be reduced when compared to conventional nano positioners. To fulfill the microfactory vision, numerous challenges related to design, power, control and nanoscale task completion by these microrobots must be overcome. In this work, we study three types of microrobots for the microfactory: a world’s first laser-driven micrometer-size locomotor called ChevBot，a stationary millimeter-size robotic arm, called Solid Articulated Four Axes Microrobot (sAFAM), and a light-powered centimeter-size crawler microrobot called SolarPede. The ChevBot can perform autonomous navigation and positioning on a dry surface with the guidance of a laser beam. The sAFAM has been designed to perform nano positioning in four degrees of freedom, and nanoscale tasks such as indentation, and manipulation. And the SolarPede serves as a mobile workspace or transporter in the microfactory environment

Comparison of Lift Path Planning Algorithms for Mobile Crane Operations in Heavy Industrial Projects

Heavy industrial projects, especially oil refineries, are constructed by modules prefabricated in factories, transported to sites and installed by mobile cranes. Due to a large number of lifts on the congested and dynamic site layouts in heavy industrial projects, the lift path planning has been attention for not only safe and efficient mobile crane operation but also better project productivity and safety. Although the path planning algorithms have been introduced over the years, they have not been used actively in practice since the comparison of these algorithms has not been examined yet based on the realistic mobility of mobile cranes and real site environment. Therefore, this thesis compares the path planning algorithms including A* search, rapidly exploring random tree (RRT), genetic algorithms (GA) and 3D visualization-based mathematical algorithm (3DVMA) under the same site environment in order to find a competent method using measurement metrics considering collision-free and optimal lift paths with the lower crane operation cost and less computation time. The proposed comparison is implemented in a case study that includes a series of modules lifted by a mobile crane on various site conditions. This comparison shows the advantages and disadvantages of each algorithm for the crane path planning in heavy industrial projects and suggests the direction of further research in this field