A Geometric Approach to Trajectory Planning for Underactuated Mechanical Systems

In the last decade, multi-rotors flying robots had a rapid development in industry and hobbyist communities thanks to the affordable cost and their availability of parts and components. The high number of degrees of freedom and the challenging dynamics of multi-rotors gave rise to new research problems. In particular, we are interested in the development of technologies for an autonomous fly that would al- low using multi-rotors systems to be used in contexts where the presence of humans is denied, for example in post-disaster areas or during search-and-rescue operations. Multi-rotors are an example of a larger category of robots, called \u201cunder-actuated mechanical systems\u201d (UMS) where the number of actuated degrees of freedom (DoF) is less than the number of available DoF. This thesis applies methods com- ing from geometric mechanics to study the under-actuation problem and proposes a novel method, based on the Hamiltonian formalism, to plan a feasible trajectory for UMS. We first show the application of a method called \u201cVariational Constrained System approach\u201d to a cart-pole example. We discovered that it is not possible to extend this method to generic UMS because it is valid only for a sub-class of UMS, called \u201csuper-articulated\u201d mechanical system. To overcome this limitation, we wrote the Hamilton equations of the quad- rotor and we apply a numerical \u201cdi- rect method\u201d to compute a feasible trajectory that satisfies system and endpoint constraints. We found that by including the system energy in the multi-rotor states, we are able to compute maneuvers that cannot be planned with other methods and that overcome the under-actuation constraints. To demonstrate the benefit of the method developed, we built a custom quad- rotor and an experimental setup with different obstacles, such as a gap in a wall and we show the correctness of the trajectory computed with the new method

Software Enginering Technique For Modularity Property In Component-Based Software Architecture

Robots are widely used in surgical rooms of the main hospitals. The most common surgical robot is the Intuitive "Da Vinci" but other new high-tech devices are spreading to help the surgeons in their medical tasks. Such kind of devices are useful to decrees the surgeons physical and psychological stress and increasing the overall safety. The surgical room is a complex environment with a lot of heterogeneous devices made by dierent producers. Currently the devices work independently but in order to increase the functionalities to give to the users is necessary to think how to connect all of them

Ontology-based modular architecture for surgical autonomous robots

In this work, we present a workflow for the design and the deployment of an architecture for the ex ecution of a surgical task (i.e. tool positioning on the correct trajectory for needle insertion), where the architect ure’s components skeleton are automatically derived from ontological description. We formalized basic knowledge in a way that is readable and processable by both man and machine

Optimal Solution of Kinodynamic Motion Planning for the Cart-Pole System

The aim of this work is motion planning for a class of underactuated mechanical systems. To illustrate the theory, we introduce and investigate, from a geometric and numerical point of view, the solution of kinodynamic planning for the cart\u2013pole. More precisely, given an initial condition for the configuration of the cart\u2013pole, we want to plan an optimal trajectory making the inverted pendulum on the cart to avoid an obstacle during its motion, and to attain a prescribed final configuration

Towards automated surgical robotics: a requirements engineering approach

The paper describes a design specification process for the development of novel and intelligent surgical robots. Nowadays, surgical robots are usually controlled by the surgeons manually by using teleoperation. The possibility to carry out simple surgical actions automatically has been the subject of academical research, but very few real-world applications exist. The main objective of this research is to address realistic case studies and develop systems and methods to provide surgeons with autonomous robotic assistants, performing basic surgical actions by combining sensing, dexterity and cognitive capabilities. This goal can only be achieved by means of a formal and rigorous assesment of surgical requirements, so that they can be analysed and translated into behavioral specifications for an autonomous robotic system. Therefore, the paper describes the application of Requirements Engineering to surgical knowledge formalization and propose a methodology for the transformation of requirements into formal models of robotic tasks

Development of a cognitive robotic system for simple surgical tasks

The introduction of robotic surgery within the operating rooms has significantly improved the quality of many surgical procedures. Recently, the research on medical robotic systems focused on increasing the level of autonomy in order to give them the possibility to carry out simple surgical actions autonomously. This paper reports on the development of technologies for introducing automation within the surgical workflow. The results have been obtained during the ongoing FP7 European funded project Intelligent Surgical Robotics (I-SUR). The main goal of the project is to demonstrate that autonomous robotic surgical systems can carry out simple surgical tasks effectively and without major intervention by surgeons. To fulfil this goal, we have developed innovative solutions (both in terms of technologies and algorithms) for the following aspects: fabrication of soft organ models starting from CT images, surgical planning and execution of movement of robot arms in contact with a deformable environment, designing a surgical interface minimizing the cognitive load of the surgeon supervising the actions, intra-operative sensing and reasoning to detect normal transitions and unexpected events. All these technologies have been integrated using a component-based software architecture to control a novel robot designed to perform the surgical actions under study. In this work we provide an overview of our system and report on preliminary results of the automatic execution of needle insertion for the cryoablation of kidney tumours