Towards Fault Diagnosis in Reconfigurable Robot

東京電機大学201

A Tread/Limb/Serpentine Hybrid Robot: Toward Hypermobility in Deconstructed Environments

According to the Red Cross, an average of over 600 disasters and 100,000 associated deaths occur annually throughout the world. This frequency of disasters strains an already overburdened disaster response effort. In the first 48 hours of a rescue operation, it is estimated that a responder will get less than three hours of continuous sleep as they need to work at full force to set up the operation and begin work in the field. This leads to sleep deprivation during the most critical time for search and rescue of victims. Therefore, robots are greatly needed as a force multiplier in USAR response to reduce some of the burden and workload placed on the human rescue workers to make for a more efficient and effective response

Mechanical Description of a Hyper-Redundant Robot Joint Mechanism Used for a Design of a Biomimetic Robotic Fish

A biologically inspired robot in the form of fish (mackerel) model using rubber (as the biomimetic material) for its hyper-redundant joint is presented in this paper. Computerized simulation of the most critical part of the model (the peduncle) shows that the rubber joints will be able to take up the stress that will be created. Furthermore, the frequency-induced softening of the rubber used was found to be critical if the joints are going to oscillate at frequency above 25 Hz. The robotic fish was able to attain a speed of 0.985 m/s while the tail beats at a maximum of 1.7 Hz when tested inside water. Furthermore, a minimum turning radius of 0.8 m (approximately 2 times the fish body length) was achieved

Control of Bio-Inspired Sprawling Posture Quadruped Robots with an Actuated Spine

Sprawling posture robots are characterized by upper limb segments protruding horizontally from the body, resulting in lower body height and wider support on the ground. Combined with an actuated segmented spine and tail, such morphology resembles that of salamanders or crocodiles. Although bio-inspired salamander-like robots with simple rotational limbs have been created, not much research has been done on kinematically redundant bio-mimetic robots that can closely replicate kinematics of sprawling animal gaits. Being bio-mimetic could allow a robot to have some of the locomotion skills observed in those animals, expanding its potential applications in challenging scenarios. At the same time, the robot could be used to answer questions about the animal's locomotion. This thesis is focused on developing locomotion controllers for such robots. Due to their high number of degrees of freedom (DoF), the control is based on solving the limb and spine inverse kinematics to properly coordinate different body parts. It is demonstrated how active use of a spine improves the robot's walking and turning performance. Further performance improvement across a variety of gaits is achieved by using model predictive control (MPC) methods to dictate the motion of the robot's center of mass (CoM). The locomotion controller is reused on an another robot (OroBOT) with similar morphology, designed to mimic the kinematics of a fossil belonging to Orobates, an extinct early tetrapod. Being capable of generating different gaits and quantitatively measuring their characteristics, OroBOT was used to find the most probable way the animal moved. This is useful because understanding locomotion of extinct vertebrates helps to conceptualize major transitions in their evolution. To tackle field applications, e.g. in disaster response missions, a new generation of field-oriented sprawling posture robots was built. The robustness of their initial crocodile-inspired design was tested in the animal's natural habitat (Uganda, Africa) and subsequently enhanced with additional sensors, cameras and computer. The improvements to the software framework involved a smartphone user interface visualizing the robot's state and camera feed to improve the ease of use for the operator. Using force sensors, the locomotion controller is expanded with a set of reflex control modules. It is demonstrated how these modules improve the robot's performance on rough and unstructured terrain. The robot's design and its low profile allow it to traverse low passages. To also tackle narrow passages like pipes, an unconventional crawling gait is explored. While using it, the robot lies on the ground and pushes against the pipe walls to move the body. To achieve such a task, several new control and estimation modules were developed. By exploring these problems, this thesis illustrates fruitful interactions that can take place between robotics, biology and paleontology

The Future of Humanoid Robots

This book provides state of the art scientific and engineering research findings and developments in the field of humanoid robotics and its applications. It is expected that humanoids will change the way we interact with machines, and will have the ability to blend perfectly into an environment already designed for humans. The book contains chapters that aim to discover the future abilities of humanoid robots by presenting a variety of integrated research in various scientific and engineering fields, such as locomotion, perception, adaptive behavior, human-robot interaction, neuroscience and machine learning. The book is designed to be accessible and practical, with an emphasis on useful information to those working in the fields of robotics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computational methods and other fields of science directly or indirectly related to the development and usage of future humanoid robots. The editor of the book has extensive R&D experience, patents, and publications in the area of humanoid robotics, and his experience is reflected in editing the content of the book