Assisting dependent people at home through autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles

This work describes a proposal of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (AUAVs) for home assistance of dependent people. AUAVs will monitor and recognize human activities during flight to improve their quality of life. However, before bringing such AUAV assistance to real homes, several challenges must be faced to make them viable and practical. Some challenges are technical and some others are related to human factors. In particular, several technical aspects are described for AUAV assistance: (1) flight control, based on our active disturbance rejection control algorithm, (2) flight planning (navigation in obstacle environments), and, (3) processing signals, acquired both from flight-control and monitoring sensors. From the assisted person’s viewpoint, our research focuses on three cues: (1) the user’s perception about AUAV assistance, (2) the influence on human acceptance of AUAV appearance and behavior at home, and (3) the human-robot interaction between assistant AUAV and assisted person. Finally, virtual reality environments are proposed to carry out preliminary tests and user acceptance evaluations.This work has been partially supported by Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Agencia Estatal de Investigaci´on (AEI) / European Regional Development Fund (FEDER, UE) under DPI2016-80894-R grant, and by CIBERSAM of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III. Lidia M. Belmonte holds FPU014/05283 scholarship from Spanish Ministerio de Educaci´on y Formación Profesional

Homotopic Path Planning on Manifolds for Cabled Mobile Robots

We present two path planning algorithms for mobile robots that are connected by cable to a fixed base. Our algorithms efficiently compute the shortest path and control strategy that lead the robot to the target location considering cable length and obstacle interactions. First, we focus on cable-obstacle collisions. We introduce and formally analyze algorithms that build and search an overlapped configuration space manifold. Next, we present an extension that considers cable-robot collisions. All algorithms are experimentally validated using a real robot

Flatness and Small-Time Controllability of Multibody Mobile Robots: Application to Motion Planning

We propose a local motion planner for a mobile robot pulling n trailers. This planner verifies a topological property so that it is suitable for different global motion planning schemes including obstacle avoidance. We use for this the differential flatness of this system. 1 Introduction Motion Planning for nonholonomic systems with or without obstacles has motivated a lot of work for ten years (e.g., [1, 4, 10, 12, 6]). Mobile robots with n trailers have been proved differentially flat under some hypotheses [5]. The main consequence of this property from a motion planning viewpoint is that a feasible path of the system can be deduced from any C n+1 curve followed by the middle point of the last trailer's axle (i.e., the linearizing outputs of the system). Thus, in the absence of obstacles, planning a motion for the system consists in finding a C n+1 curve for the linearizing outputs. In [5] the authors propose to use polynomial curves. Nevertheless, in the presence of obstacles t..