Yet another approach to the Gough-Stewart platform forward kinematics

© 20xx IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.The forward kinematics of the Gough-Stewart platform, and their simplified versions in which some leg endpoints coalesce, has been typically solved using variable elimination methods. In this paper, we cast doubts on whether this is the easiest way to solve the problem. We will see how the indirect approach in which the length of some extra virtual legs is first computed leads to important simplifications. In particular, we provide a procedure to solve 30 out of 34 possible topologies for a Gough-Stewart platform without variable elimination.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Path planning for active tensegrity structures

This paper presents a path planning method for actuated tensegrity structures with quasi-static motion. The valid configurations for such structures lay on an equilibrium manifold, which is implicitly defined by a set of kinematic and static constraints. The exploration of this manifold is difficult with standard methods due to the lack of a global parameterization. Thus, this paper proposes the use of techniques with roots in differential geometry to define an atlas, i.e., a set of coordinated local parameterizations of the equilibrium manifold. This atlas is exploited to define a rapidly-exploring random tree, which efficiently finds valid paths between configurations. However, these paths are typically long and jerky and, therefore, this paper also introduces a procedure to reduce their control effort. A variety of test cases are presented to empirically evaluate the proposed method. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

A bayesian approach to simultaneously recover camera pose and non-rigid shape from monocular images

© . This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/In this paper we bring the tools of the Simultaneous Localization and Map Building (SLAM) problem from a rigid to a deformable domain and use them to simultaneously recover the 3D shape of non-rigid surfaces and the sequence of poses of a moving camera. Under the assumption that the surface shape may be represented as a weighted sum of deformation modes, we show that the problem of estimating the modal weights along with the camera poses, can be probabilistically formulated as a maximum a posteriori estimate and solved using an iterative least squares optimization. In addition, the probabilistic formulation we propose is very general and allows introducing different constraints without requiring any extra complexity. As a proof of concept, we show that local inextensibility constraints that prevent the surface from stretching can be easily integrated. An extensive evaluation on synthetic and real data, demonstrates that our method has several advantages over current non-rigid shape from motion approaches. In particular, we show that our solution is robust to large amounts of noise and outliers and that it does not need to track points over the whole sequence nor to use an initialization close from the ground truth.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Closure polynomials for strips of tetrahedra

The final publication is available at link.springer.comA tetrahedral strip is a tetrahedron-tetrahedron truss where any tetrahedron has two neighbors except those in the extremes which have only one. Unless any of the tetrahedra degenerate, such a truss is rigid. In this case, if the distance between the strip endpoints is imposed, any rod length in the truss is constrained by all the others to attain discrete values. In this paper, it is shown how to characterize these values as the roots of a closure polynomial whose derivation requires surprisingly no other tools than elementary algebraic manipulations. As an application of this result, the forward kinematics of two parallel platforms with closure polynomials of degree 16 and 12 is straightforwardly solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Closure polynomials for strips of tetrahedra

The final publication is available at link.springer.comA tetrahedral strip is a tetrahedron-tetrahedron truss where any tetrahedron has two neighbors except those in the extremes which have only one. Unless any of the tetrahedra degenerate, such a truss is rigid. In this case, if the distance between the strip endpoints is imposed, any rod length in the truss is constrained by all the others to attain discrete values. In this paper, it is shown how to characterize these values as the roots of a closure polynomial whose derivation requires surprisingly no other tools than elementary algebraic manipulations. As an application of this result, the forward kinematics of two parallel platforms with closure polynomials of degree 16 and 12 is straightforwardly solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Closed-form position analysis of variable geometry trusses

© . This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/Variable geometry trusses are composed, in general, of unit cells which can be modeled as bars connected by spherical joints. Under mild conditions, it has been shown that the only feasible cells are topologically equivalent to bipyramids. Unfortunately, using standard formulations, the closed-form position analysis of bipyramids is not a trivial task. Actually, it has only been achieved for bipyramids with up to 7 vertices, whose closure polynomial has been shown to be of order 24. In this paper, using a distance-based formulation and a kinematic inversion for fans of tetrahedra, the problem is solved for bipyramids with up to 11 vertices, whose closure polynomial is of degree 896. No other position analysis problem leading to such a high-order closure polynomial has been previously solved.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author's final draft

Path planning with loop closure constraints using an atlas-based RRT

In many relevant path planning problems, loop closure constraints reduce the configuration space to a manifold embedded in the higher-dimensional joint ambient space. Whereas many progresses have been done to solve path planning problems in the presence of obstacles, only few work consider loop closure constraints. In this paper we present the AtlasRRT algorithm, a planner specially tailored for such constrained systems that builds on recently developed tools for higher-dimensional continuation. These tools provide procedures to define charts that locally parametrize manifolds and to coordinate them forming an atlas. AtlasRRT simultaneously builds an atlas and a Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT), using the atlas to sample relevant configurations for the RRT, and the RRT to devise directions of expansion for the atlas. The new planner is advantageous since samples obtained from the atlas allow a more efficient extension of the RRT than state of the art approaches, where samples are generated in the joint ambient space.Peer ReviewedPostprint (author’s final draft

Path planning on manifolds using randomized higher-dimensional continuation

Despite the significant advances in path planning methods, problems involving highly constrained spaces are still challenging. In particular, in many situations the configuration space is a non-parametrizable variety implicitly defined by constraints, which complicates the successful generalization of sampling-based path planners. In this paper, we present a new path planning algorithm specially tailored for highly constrained systems. It builds on recently developed tools for Higher-dimensional Continuation, which provide numerical procedures to describe an implicitly defined variety using a set of local charts. We propose to extend these methods to obtain an efficient path planner on varieties, handling highly constrained problems. The advantage of this planner comes from that it directly operates into the configuration space and not into the higher-dimensional ambient space, as most of the existing methods do.Postprint (author’s final draft

A randomized kinodynamic planner for closed-chain robotic systems

Kinodynamic RRT planners are effective tools for finding feasible trajectories in many classes of robotic systems. However, they are hard to apply to systems with closed-kinematic chains, like parallel robots, cooperating arms manipulating an object, or legged robots keeping their feet in contact with the environ- ment. The state space of such systems is an implicitly-defined manifold, which complicates the design of the sampling and steering procedures, and leads to trajectories that drift away from the manifold when standard integration methods are used. To address these issues, this report presents a kinodynamic RRT planner that constructs an atlas of the state space incrementally, and uses this atlas to both generate ran- dom states, and to dynamically steer the system towards such states. The steering method is based on computing linear quadratic regulators from the atlas charts, which greatly increases the planner efficiency in comparison to the standard method that simulates random actions. The atlas also allows the integration of the equations of motion as a differential equation on the state space manifold, which eliminates any drift from such manifold and thus results in accurate trajectories. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first kinodynamic planner that explicitly takes closed kinematic chains into account. We illustrate the performance of the approach in significantly complex tasks, including planar and spatial robots that have to lift or throw a load at a given velocity using torque-limited actuators.Peer ReviewedPreprin

Probabilistic simultaneous pose and non-rigid shape recovery

We present an algorithm to simultaneously recover non-rigid shape and camera poses from point correspondences between a reference shape and a sequence of input images. The key novel contribution of our approach is in bringing the tools of the probabilistic SLAM methodology from a rigid to a deformable domain. Under the assumption that the shape may be represented as a weighted sum of deformation modes, we show that the problem of estimating the modal weights along with the camera poses, may be probabilistically formulated as a maximum a posterior estimate and solved using an iterative least squares optimization. An extensive evaluation on synthetic and real data, shows that our approach has several significant advantages over current approaches, such as performing robustly under large amounts of noise and outliers, and neither requiring to track points over the whole sequence nor initializations close from the ground truth solution.Postprint (author’s final draft