An Architectural Framework for Modeling Teleoperated service robots

Teleoperated robots are used to perform tasks that human operators cannot carry out because of the nature of the tasks themselves or the hostile nature of the working environment. Though many control architectures have been defined for developing these kinds of systems reusing common components, none has attained all its objectives because of the high variability of system behaviors. This paper presents a new architectural approach that takes into account the latest advances in robotic architectures while adopting a component-oriented approach. This approach provides a common framework for developing robotized systems with very different behaviors and for integrating intelligent components. The architecture is currently being used, tested and improved in the development of a family of teleoperated robots which perform cleaning of ship-hull surfaces.Este trabajo está parcialmente financiado por CICYT ref. TIC2003-07804-C05-02 y la Comunidad Autónoma de Murcia (Séneca PB/5/FS/02

An implemetation of a teleoperated robot control architecture on a PLC and field-bus based plarform

Teleoperated robots are used to perform hazardous tasks that human operators cannot carry out. The purpose of this paper is to present a new architecture (ACROSET) for the development of these systems that takes into account the current advances in robotic architectures while adopting the component-oriented approach. ACROSET provides a common framework for developing this kind of robotized systems and for integrating intelligent components. The architecture is currently being used, tested and improved in the development of a family of robots, teleoperated cranes and vehicles which perform environmentally friendly cleaning of ship-hull surfaces (the EFTCoR project). This paper summarises the features of this project and describes the implementation of ACROSET on a hardware platform based on a PLC (Programmed Logic Controller) SIEMENS SIMATIC S7-300 and the Field-Bus PROFIBUS DP

Robot Autonomy for Surgery

Autonomous surgery involves having surgical tasks performed by a robot operating under its own will, with partial or no human involvement. There are several important advantages of automation in surgery, which include increasing precision of care due to sub-millimeter robot control, real-time utilization of biosignals for interventional care, improvements to surgical efficiency and execution, and computer-aided guidance under various medical imaging and sensing modalities. While these methods may displace some tasks of surgical teams and individual surgeons, they also present new capabilities in interventions that are too difficult or go beyond the skills of a human. In this chapter, we provide an overview of robot autonomy in commercial use and in research, and present some of the challenges faced in developing autonomous surgical robots

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 344)

This bibliography lists 125 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during January, 1989. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and psychology, life support systems and controlled environments, safety equipment, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, and flight crew behavior and performance

Remote interaction with mobile robots

This paper describes an architecture, which can be used to build remote laboratories to interact remotely via Internet with mobile robots using different interaction devices. A supervisory control strategy has been used to develop the remote laboratory in order to alleviate high communication data rates and system sensitivity to network delays. The users interact with the remote system at a more abstract level using high level commands. The local robot's autonomy has been increased by encapsulating all the robot's behaviors in different types of skills. User interfaces have been designed using visual proxy pattern to facilitate any future extension or code reuse. The developed remote laboratory has been integrated into an educational environment in the field of indoor mobile robotics. This environment is currently being used as a part of an international project to develop a distributed laboratory for autonomous and teleoperated systems (IECAT, 2003).Publicad

A Tradeoff Analysis of a Cloud-Based Robot Navigation Assistant Using Stereo Image Processing

The use of Cloud Computing for computation offloading in the robotics area has become a field of interest today. The aim of this work is to demonstrate the viability of cloud offloading in a low level and intensive computing task: a vision-based navigation assistance of a service mobile robot. In order to do so, a prototype, running over a ROS-based mobile robot (Erratic by Videre Design LLC) is presented. The information extracted from on-board stereo cameras will be used by a private cloud platform consisting of five bare-metal nodes with AMD Phenom 965 4 CPU, with the cloud middleware Openstack Havana. The actual task is the shared control of the robot teleoperation, that is, the smooth filtering of the teleoperated commands with the detected obstacles to prevent collisions. All the possible offloading models for this case are presented and analyzed. Several performance results using different communication technologies and offloading models are explained as well. In addition to this, a real navigation case in a domestic circuit was done. The tests demonstrate that offloading computation to the Cloud improves the performance and navigation results with respect to the case where all processing is done by the robot.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-02/0

ROS based Teleoperation and Docking of a Low Speed Urban Vehicle

In recent years, 4G LTE technology has provided us with higher than ever transfer speeds over the cellular networks, permitting streaming of video and other high bandwidth services. On the other hand, there has been a rapid development and an explosion of interest in frameworks for robot software development, particularly ROS. Though there have been many studies which have leveraged 4G LTE network as the mode of communication when studying teleoperations, a very few studies have used 4G LTE network with ROS framework for building teleoperated systems. Therefore, this study seeks to build a teleoperated system using the ROS framework which employs the 4G LTE network for communication. For this purpose, a prototype system is built using a remote-controlled low speed urban vehicle that hosts a multimedia link between the vehicle and the control station. The operator drives the vehicle remotely primarily based on processed video feed and LIDAR data. The vehicle is also equipped with safety systems to avoid collisions. The teleoperated system built is tested by asking an experienced driver to complete certain tasks while driving the vehicle remotely. Moreover, this study also intends to build an autonomous docking procedure for the vehicle. A docking procedure based on differential GPS and video feedback is built that allows the vehicle to autonomously dock itself into a charging station. The procedure provides a proof of concept solution for the autonomous charging/fueling of self-driving cars.  M.S

Telerobotic Sensor-based Tool Control Derived From Behavior-based Robotics Concepts

@font-face { font-family: TimesNewRoman ; }p.MsoNormal, li.MsoNormal, div.MsoNormal { margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt; font-size: 12pt; font-family: Times New Roman ; }div.Section1 { page: Section1; } Teleoperated task execution for hazardous environments is slow and requires highly skilled operators. Attempts to implement telerobotic assists to improve efficiency have been demonstrated in constrained laboratory environments but are not being used in the field because they are not appropriate for use on actual remote systems operating in complex unstructured environments using typical operators. This work describes a methodology for combining select concepts from behavior-based systems with telerobotic tool control in a way that is compatible with existing manipulator architectures used by remote systems typical to operations in hazardous environment. The purpose of the approach is to minimize the task instance modeling in favor of a priori task type models while using sensor information to register the task type model to the task instance. The concept was demonstrated for two tools useful to decontamination & dismantlement type operations—a reciprocating saw and a powered socket tool. The experimental results demonstrated that the approach works to facilitate traded control telerobotic tooling execution by enabling difficult tasks and by limiting tool damage. The role of the tools and tasks as drivers to the telerobotic implementation was better understood in the need for thorough task decomposition and the discovery and examination of the tool process signature. The contributions of this work include: (1) the exploration and evaluation of select features of behavior-based robotics to create a new methodology for integrating telerobotic tool control with positional teleoperation in the execution of complex tool-centric remote tasks, (2) the simplification of task decomposition and the implementation of sensor-based tool control in such a way that eliminates the need for the creation of a task instance model for telerobotic task execution, and (3) the discovery, demonstrated use, and documentation of characteristic tool process signatures that have general value in the investigation of other tool control, tool maintenance, and tool development strategies above and beyond the benefit sustained for the methodology described in this work

Scaling up Three Dimensional Printing

New processes and machines are proposed in academia and on the market, down to the microscopic range. On a different side, manufacturing complex parts of large size by additive processes has still unexplored potential. This paper describes the patented 3DPrinting D-Shape technology, one of the few available to build parts up to 3 tons. Three sands have been tested, calcareous dolomite, granite and pozzolana (regolith-like) with pulverized MgO, under the action of an aqueous MgCl2 binder, focusing on the optimization of the inkjet parameters